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the popular game show syndicated on American television. With the topic being
“State capitals” the following was the final Jeopardy answer in one episode:
This state capital was a compromise between the North Platters and the South
Platters.
To respond correctly you had to activate a schema about geography and state cap-
itals. For example, you needed to infer that “Platter” related to the Platte River. And,
you needed to know that the Platte River runs through Nebraska and that Lincoln is
Nebraska's capital. Indeed, “What is Lincoln?” is the correct question. Any time we
form conceptual bridges between what we already know and what we are to learn is
a form of schema activation.
Elaboration
You are at a noisy party. When you miss some of the conversation, you fill in details,
trying to make sense of an incomplete message. You do the same when you read
a text or listen to a lecture. You expand on (and sometimes distort) information
to make it fit your expectations and current understanding. In each case, you are
elaborating
on either the message or what you already know.
Elaboration
is an encoding strategy that increases the meaningfulness of new
information by connecting it to existing knowledge (Terry, 2006). For example, a
student who remembers the location of the Atlantic ocean on the globe because it
starts with an “a” and the Americas and Africa also begin with “a,” or a student
who remembers 6
54 because the sum of the digits in the product of a num-
ber times 9 always equals 9 (5 + 4
×
9
=
9) is capitalizing on elaboration as an enco-
ding strategy. When elaboration is used to remember factual information such as
the location of the Atlantic Ocean or 6
=
54, it is often called
elaborative
rehearsal
. Research confirms the superiority of elaborative rehearsal for
long-term retention of information (Craik, 1979; King-Friedrichs & Browne,
2001).
In addition to elaborative rehearsal, two additional elaboration strategies can be
effective. They are (1) the use of examples and analogies and (2) mnemonics.
Examples and Analogies.
One of the most effective ways of promoting elab-
oration is through examples and other representations that illustrate the topic
being taught. Working with examples—constructing, finding, or analyzing them—
is arguably the most powerful elaboration strategy that exists because it also capi-
talizes on schema activation (Cassady, 1999). When people create or identify a
new example of an idea, they activate their prior knowledge and then elaborate
on their understanding of that idea. The attempt to illustrate the content of this
chapter is our attempt to capitalize on elaboration as an encoding strategy. Teachers
who use examples extensively also capitalize on elaboration as an encoding strat-
egy. Examples also help accommodate lack of prior knowledge related to the
topic.
When examples are not available, using
analogies
, descriptions of relationships
that are similar in some but not all respects, can be an effective elaboration strategy
×
9
=
