Abstract

VILLALTA-CERDAS, Adrián  and  SANDI-URENA, Santiago. Self-explaining and its use in college chemistry instruction. Educ. quím [online]. 2013, vol.24, n.4, pp.431-438. ISSN 0187-893X.

The generation and evaluation of scientific evidence and explanations is a fundamental scientific competency that science education should foster. As a learning strategy, self-explaining refers to students' generation of inferences about causality, which in science can be related to making-sense of how and why phenomena happen. Substantial empirical research has shown that activities that elicit self-explaining enhance learning in the sciences. Despite the potential of self-explaining, college instruction often presents chemistry as a rhetoric of conclusions, thereby instilling the view that chemistry is a mere collection of facts. In addition to a frail understanding of the concept, other factors that may contribute to the underuse of self-explaining activities in college chemistry are the following: lack of an accessible corpus of literature and lack of research related to chemical education. This paper intends to contribute to improving the understanding of self-explaining in chemistry education and to describe the current state of research on self-explaining in tertiary level science education. This work stems from preliminary research to study ways to promote engagement in self-explaining during chemistry instruction and to assess how different levels of engagement influence learning of specific chemistry content.

Keywords : chemical education; science education; self-explaining; higher education.

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