Learning Chemical Equilibrium Via Self-explanations

Author: Mei-Hung Chiu(Graduate Institute of Science Education, National Taiwan Normal University)

Abstract：

Research shows that students have difficulties in learning sciences in school context. Although there are many factors influence students' achievement in learning science, it is a vital issue that how we can help our students be successful in school learning. This study intends to investigate a potentially powerful learning strategy, self-explanations, for students' mean-ingful learning.
The purposes of this study are(l) to investigate how students generate inferences while reading the materials for learning chemical equilibrium, (2) to examine the structure and content of the inferences, and ( 3) to interpret the quality of influences generated by the more and less suc-cessful students.
The procedures are as follows: (l)pretest(including terms, real life problems, and content-specific problems), (2) reading phase, (3)studying examples (mainly required to think aloud so that researcher can tape-re-cord one's verbal data for later transcription and analyses.
The results reveal that there are six types of inferences: reference in-ference, commonsense inference, related inference, comparative inference, logical inference, and integrated inference. Also, the study finds that students tend to generate local influences during study. They are lack of linking knowledge globally. Finally, the results show the more successful students provide better quality of influences than the less successful students.

Keywords：inference, self-explanation, knowledge representation

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