Despite the potential advantages of instructional explanations, evidence indicates that they are usually ineffective. Subsequent work has shown that in order to make instructional explanations effective indeed, one successful strategy is to combine them with indications of the limitations in learners' understanding that they are intended to…

Effective instructional explanations help the students to construct coherent mental representations. To do so, one condition is that they must be tailored to students' needs. It is hypothesized that explanations are more helpful if they also explicitly aid the students to detect problems in their mental representations, as this provokes an impasse…

Analyzes fifth grade students' diagrams and explanations for the spatial, causal, and dynamic processes inside the earth. Identifies and characterizes the different types of student models for the inside of the earth, and characterizes the reasoning associated with these models. (Contains 74 references.) (Author/YDS)