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In this eposide of the ERRR podcast I speak with Alexander Renkl about self-explanation. That is, the role that students' internal dialogues play in their ability to learn from worked examples and during problem solving, as well as the way that teachers can effectively prompt self-explanations. Students' self-explanation abilities are one of the key distinguishing factors between more- and less-successful learners, and it's this distinction that we dive into head first within this episode! Towards the end of the interview, we touch upon that integration of cognitive load theory with self regulated learning.
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Alexander Renkl started his studies with psychology and soon found himself working in the prestigious Max Planck Institute of psychological research in Germany. Since then, he has had many years of fascinating research in education and he's co-authored over 350 publications in scientific journals, conference proceedings, books and journals for practitioners. Alexander's main research areas include example-based learning, learning strategies retrieval practice learning by journal writing, and the two topics that we touch upon in this podcast self-explanation and the new push to integrate cognitive load theory with self-regulated learning. It was a real honour to speak with Alexander because I'm a huge fan of his work and his writing is both clear and practical, offering wonderful insights into how students learn. Alexander is an incredibly deep thinker and he has a rich array of highly valuable mental models around how learning happens. As a result. This is a very wide ranging discussion touching upon many ideas about how learning happens, and has given me half a dozen or more new threads of ideas and theories that I'm keen to explore further.
Links/resources mentioned in the show
- Franz Weinert, one of the biggest influencers of Alexander's thinking
- The Pittsburg LRDC: Learning research and development centre. <– Alexander recommends highly
- Alexander Renkl's 1997 study on the self-explanation effect
- Sweller's Cognitive architecture and instructional design: 20 years later
- Rittle-Johnsons' Instruction Based upon Self-explanation (can read part for free)
- Alexander's 3 recommended papers
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- Renkl, 2014, Toward an instructionally oriented theory of example‐based learning
- Renkl and Eitel, 2019, Self-explaining: learning about principles and their application (This isn't free, but it's an excellent summary, it's found in the book, Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education, pg. 528–549 (usually authors are happy to send you a chapter if you email them : )
- Renkl 2015, Different roads lead to Rome: the case of principle-based cognitive skills. Alexander summarised this paper as suggesting that the current view of active learning is incorrect! (Again, unfortunately not free)
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This episode of the ERRR Podcast is brought to you by John Catt Educational. Use this link along with the code provided within the podcast to get 30% off all books from John Catt Educational! https://www.johncattbookshop.com/books/errr
Listen to all past episodes of the ERRR podcast here.