About

ExplainIt offers the opportunity to fundamentally improve classroom dynamics by supporting both students and instructors. Students and instructors in undergraduate STEM courses will benefit from ExplainIt's support for analyzing and providing feedback on students’ explanations through an integrated five-step explanation feedback loop: 

1. The instructor will issue an explanation prompt, which will appear in the ExplainIt app on students’ computing devices (laptops, tablets, and phones).

2. Students will write short-answer explanations ranging from a phrase to a short paragraph in the ExplainIt app on their computing devices.

3. ExplainIt will automatically analyze students’ explanations in real-time and provide real-time formative feedback to students individually in their apps. 

4. ExplainIt will provide a summary of categories of student explanations to the instructor. 

5. The instructor will make “instructional pivots” by immediately tailoring pedagogy to respond to students’ explanations to improve student learning and engagement by focusing the lecture and classroom discussion on the most important elements of the course material. 

Collectively, these rich explanation-based activities will synergistically lead to improved student learning and promote greater student engagement in undergraduate STEM classrooms.

Our design of ExplainIt is guided by the ICAP model of learning (Chi & Wylie, 2014). The ICAP model connects self-explanation to learning outcomes and elucidates why self-explanation is such an effective learning strategy compared to other less active approaches. ICAP identifies four modes of student engagement: Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive, each of which has associated learning behaviors and cognitive processes. 

The ICAP model predicts that as students become more engaged with learning materials, moving from passive, to active, to constructive, to interactive engagement, their learning will improve. ExplainIt enables students to go beyond Passive engagement and Active engagement by using Constructive engagement (via ExplainIt's triggering the self-explanation effect) and Interactive engagement (via ExplainIt's providing interactive feedback on students’ explanations).

Because of ExplainIt's grounding in the ICAP model of learning and its ability to trigger the self-explanation effect in students, ExplainIt is specifically designed to achieve its target benefits through two additional mechanisms. First, it provides individualized feedback to students on their explanations. Second, it provides class-level feedback to instructors, which helps instructors improve instructional practices. Collectively, these mechanisms produce two sets of benefits to students: improved STEM learning with respect to conceptual knowledge and problem solving, and improved STEM engagement with respect to self-efficacy for STEM and interest in STEM.