The Effect of Explanatory Activities for Confirmation of Understanding on the Understanding and Self-Evaluation of Explainers and Listeners

Abstract

In this study, we focused on explanatory activities to confirm one's own understanding and examined their effects on the explainer and the listener. Thirty-two university students were asked to read a passage about chi-square tests and then to explain what they understood to the listener. After studying a passage, students were divided into pairs, one as the explainer (16 students) and the other as the listener (16 students). The explainer was asked to generate an online explanation to confirm understanding, and the listener was asked to watch a video recording of the explanation. When the comprehension tests were compared, no significant differences were detected between the two groups. As a result of category analysis of the utterances, only the utterance about "maki/ng sense of data" showed a correlation with the comprehension test. Self-evaluations before and after the explanation indicated that there was a difference in the change in self-evaluation score between the explainer and the listener. The results of this study show the key points in implementing explanations to confirm understanding.