Making the implicit explicit: Exploring the role of mistakes and explanation in problem-solving

Laras Yuniarto (Heriot-Watt University)

When children and adults tackle novel problems, what kinds of experiences can best facilitate a relatively explicit, abstract, conceptual understanding of the problem at hand? In this talk, I’ll first introduce my PhD work on children’s experience with correcting their own mistakes, focusing on whether the implicit ‘success without understanding’ achieved during self-correction is necessary for later explicit understanding. I’ll discuss our findings that self-correction did indeed improve behavioural performance, but only for in-person, not online, problems. I’ll also discuss some surprising divergences between children’s behaviour and their verbal explanations, with implications for our understanding of early conceptual change. Finally, I’ll preview an ongoing project with Eve Holden at the University of St Andrews, focusing on self-explanation experience. Prior work has established that explaining correct solutions to oneself, at length, can promote more explicit understanding. We will explore whether undergraduate Psychology students benefit from self-explaining their own actions during statistics practical classes, using explanation prompts with varying time costs.

In-person: James Watt Craig-Committee Room, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh;
Online: click ‘Join via MS Teams’.