Elaboration

As a skipper of the team, you are at the playground taking instruction from your team coach and the ambience is noisy. When you miss some of the information, you fill in details, trying to make sense of an incomplete message. You do the same when you read a text or listen to a lecture. You expand on (and sometimes distort) information to make it fit your expectations and current understanding. In each case, you are elaborating on either the message or what you already know.

Elaboration in learning involves meaning-enhancing additions, constructions, or generations that improve one's memory for what is being learned.

For example, a student who remembers the location of the Atlantic Ocean on the globe because it starts with an “a” and the Americas and Africa also begin with “a,” or a student who remembers 6 x 9 = 54 because the sum of the digits in the product of a number times 9 always equals 9 (5 + 4 = 9) is capitalizing on elaboration as an encoding strategy.

When elaboration is used to remember factual information such as locations of the Atlantic Ocean or 6 x 9 = 54, it is often called elaborative rehearsal. Research confirms the superiority of elaborative rehearsal for long-term retention of information (Craik, 1979).

In addition to elaborative rehearsal, two additional elaboration strategies are known to be effective. These include:

1. the use of examples and analogies, and
2. the use of mnemonics.

We’ll spend the remainder of the study addressing these approaches.

1. Examples and Analogies

One of the most effective ways of promoting elaboration is through examples and other representations that illustrate the topic being taught or what is being learned.

Working with examples, such as constructing, finding, or analyzing them, is arguably the most powerful elaboration strategy that exists because it also capitalizes on schema activation Opens in new window (Cassady, 1999). When people create or identify a new example of an idea, they activate their prior knowledge and then elaborate on their understanding of that idea.

The attempt to illustrate the content of this study is our attempt to capitalize on elaboration as an encoding strategy. Teachers who use examples extensively also capitalize on elaboration as an encoding strategy. Examples also help accommodate lack of prior knowledge related to the topic.

When examples are not available, using analogies—descriptions of relationship that are similar in some but not all respects, can be an effective elaboration strategy (Bulgren, Deshler, Schumaker, & Lentz, 2000).

As an example, consider the following analogy from science:

The veins and arteries are similar, but not identical, to pipes, and the heart is a type of pump. The analogy is an effective form of elaboration because it links new information to a pumping station—an idea learners already understood.

2. Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic Devices are memory strategies that link knowledge to be learned to familiar information, and they have been proven effective in a variety of content areas (Bloom & Lamkin, 2006; Uygur & Ozdas, 2007). Mnemonics Opens in new window are a large area of study. clearly, they are beyond the scope of this study, hence, they are treated in a designated study here Opens in new window.