Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Abstract

To investigate children's ability to translate between the environment and an abstract representation, fourth graders were asked to indicate the location of colored flags by placing similarly colored stickers on a map. In the explaining condition, students wrote down what clues they had used; in the baseline condition, they placed stickers without explanation. The explaining students significantly outperformed the baseline students, especially with respect to egregious errors indicative of failure to understand basic representational correspondence. The hypothesized interpretation is that children who generated explanations were more likely to notice and then correct discrepancies between their answers in progress and the referent space and that they did so by activating existing spatial and symbolic competencies.Becoming a skilled user of maps in the real world is not an easy cognitive task. When people look around them, they see a world that is constantly changing: day to night, season to season, and minute to minute. They perceive a landscape of millions of tiny details: blades of grass, cracks in the sidewalk, ripples on the pond. They look horizontally out across the landscape, from a vantage point 4 or 5 ft (ap-

Children's strategies and difficulties while using a map to record locations in an outdoor environment

“…Natural language structures for describing positions in space are complex and nuanced (Talmy, 1983), and fourth graders may use words or phrases imprecisely or erroneously. Moreover, we know that the very process of self-explaining tends to ameliorate certain types of mistakes (Kastens & Liben, 2007). For this reason, the findings of this study are most directly applicable to educational contexts where students are asked to self-explain (for example by writing a description of their sampling locations in their field notebook) as well as to plot the position on a map.…”

“…The participants, field area, field procedures and scoring method for the sticker placements are described fully in Kastens and Liben (2007). We repeat here only sufficient detail for the reader to follow the current paper.…”

“…These are the students who were designated as the "Explaining Group" in Kastens and Liben (2007). We chose to work with fourth graders because the US National Geographic Standards assert that basic map skills should have been mastered by this grade (Geography Education Standards Project, 1994) and prior research has shown that the field-mapping task is challenging but not impossible for this age group (Kastens et al, 2001).…”

“…An earlier paper (Kastens & Liben, 2007) documented the abundance and distribution of representational and configurational correspondence errors in the sticker-placement data. It showed that participants who were required to explain their reasoning placed their stickers more accurately than did those who were not asked to do so.…”

The Roles of Explanation and Feedback in False Belief Understanding: A Microgenetic Analysis

“…Self-explanations, referring to causal inferences about events in an individual's environment (Siegler & Lin, 2010), enhance children's learning in a variety of areas including relational similarity (Honomichl & Chen, 2006), mathematical strategy use (e.g., Siegler Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 09:05 01 April 2015 1995Siegler & Lin, 2010), addition (Calin-Jageman & Horn Ratner, 2005), balance (Pine & Messer, 2000), map skills (Kastens & Liben, 2007), emotion understanding (Tenenbaum, Alfieri, Brooks, & Dunne, 2008, and perspective taking (Pillow, Mash, Aloian, & Hill, 2002). Across several studies children experienced greater gains in cognitive understanding when they had to generate explanations for their own or another's response than when they did not.…”