Elaboration
Elaboration means as you are reading and studying, you take an active role in thinking about the information by asking questions, making connections, and relating it to your own experiences. This process involves retrieval practice, concrete examples, and interleaving.
See below for details or review this downloadable poster.
How to Do It
Ask yourself questions while you are studying about how things work and why, and then find the answers in your class materials and discuss them with your classmates.
As you elaborate, make connections between different ideas to explain how they work together. Take two ideas and think of ways they are similar and different.
Describe how the ideas you are studying apply to your own experiences or memories. As you go through your day, make connections to the ideas you are learning in class.
Note:
Make sure the way you are explaining and describing an idea is accurate. Don’t overextend the elaborations, and always check your class materials or ask your teacher.
Work your way up so that you can describe and explain without looking at your class materials.
Six Strategies for Effective Learning by Yana Weinstein, Megan Smith, & Oliver Caviglioli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.learningscientists.org.