Abstract
We investigated the educational efficacy of teaching description methods to students by assessing to what extent such instruction improved their ability to explain scientific phenomena. The description instruction used fixed sentence patterns. Two experiments were performed. In the first, the effectiveness of classes with and without description instruction was compared. In the second experiment, the effect of teaching description methods to the classes that had not received such tutoring in the first experiment was investigated. The result of the first experiment was that many more of the students in the classes that had received description instruction were able to scientifically describe phenomena. The second experiment showed that this difference in the ability to scientifically describe phenomena disappeared once description instruction was provided to the previously untutored class. The results indicate that providing description instruction is an effective way to improve the ability of students to describe phenomena scientifically.
