Learning from self-explaining emergent phenomena

To date, relatively little work has explored how students learn about a particular class of processes, namely emergent ones. The research that has investigated these processes has primarily employed a case-study methodology. Here, we report on a controlled experiment comparing how students learn about the emergent topic of diffusion from self-explaining vs. from reading. In contrast to a prior study that found self-explanation was not associated with learning about emergence, students learned significantly more in the self-explaining condition. To shed light on how different types of self-explanations are related to learning, we analyze the content of students' explanations and their association to learning outcomes; we also present qualitative analysis of students' misconceptions and how these relate to existing theories of emergent attributes.