Best Practice

How versus why: Elaborative-interrogation in your teaching

Pedagogy Lesson planning In the classroom
The aim of elaborative-interrogation is to embed knowledge of facts in students' long-term memory based around teachers asking ‘how’ and ‘why’. Andrew Jones looks at the research and asks how we can do this effectively

Those of you who are parents might have been exasperated when your children were toddlers by the tsunami of “why” questions that your inquisitive bundles of joy asked.

However, despite not being trained teachers, perhaps they were onto something pedagogically – testing our understanding of the world through constant verbal interrogation (for an intriguing discussion on why young children do this, see Stevens, 2009).

 

What is elaborative-interrogation?

Like retrieval practice, the aim of elaborative-interrogation is to embed knowledge of facts in students' long-term memory. It builds on the concept of “generation”, which is used in strategies such as the “generation effect” and “generative learning” (see Jones, 2023; Esner, 2020, respectively).

Nonetheless, the strategy goes beyond retrieval of idiosyncratic knowledge to explaining “how” or “why” something happens. Therefore, it is particularly useful for enhancing retention of sequences or processes, such as photosynthesis in science or precipitation in geography.

In the classroom, elaborative-interrogation is rather straightforward despite its somewhat obscure label. Essentially, a teacher gives prompts in the form of explicitly stated facts before students generate an explanation in response. Students can also ask and respond in pairs.

Despite its simplicity, there is relatively moderate to strong evidence of the strategy’s effectiveness in various academic studies (Dunlosky et al, 2013; Pashler et al, 2007; Weinstein et al, 2018).

Moreover, prompting elaboration with how and why questions is a remarkably easy way to elicit further inferences and explanations that potentially stem from singular statements of fact. This inevitability gives rise to better comprehension and deeper contextual understanding of the knowledge taught. The problem is that although how and why seem like simple words, students often mix them up or conflate them.

In my own teaching, I use elaborative-interrogation all the time, although my use is often subconscious and spontaneous. That said, I have never really given much thought to why I do this. Subsequently, I have now started actively thinking not only about the role and impact of elaborative-interrogation in my classroom, but also the nuances between my use of how and why.

 

Asking ‘how’

How asks about the method or way of something. Not all how questions are elaborative, however: we might ask closed or short-answer quantity questions such as: “How many (X) are there in (Y)?”/. We might also ask quality questions, which reference your senses to gain information, like: “How does it feel?”. Finally, we often ask extent questions that will be answered with a range of severity or intensity, as in: “How excited are you?” (for an overview, see Clark, 2022).

Even so, the type of how question conducive to elaborative-interrogation is procedural, which asks how something is done. They may also cue an explanation of sequential or chronological associations. This could include asking how we boil an egg in food technology or how we find a missing angle in maths. Essentially, we ask students to make connections between different ideas or facts.

For instance, a science teacher could ask: “How can you tell if a substance is acidic using a pH scale?” Here, the student needs to elaborate on the procedure of finding the pH of a substance. They will need to articulate something along the lines of: “If the pH of a solution is less than 7, it is acidic. If the pH is 7, the solution is neutral, and if the pH is greater than 7, the solution is basic.”

We now know not only that the student knows what the pH scale is for (fact), but also how it is used (process).

Moreover, we might ask our “how” questions implicitly, for example:

  • “In what way...?”
  • “In what manner...?”
  • “By what means...?”
  • “To what effect...?”

All of these will prompt students to give explanation on how something happens.

Nonetheless, although elaborations on how something works can be detailed, complex and extensive, they do not quite get to why something is the case. That is not to say, however, that they are not essential to understanding the way things work, clearly they are. In a sense, they lay the important foundations which then allow us to ask why.

 

Asking ‘why’

Unlike how questions, why questions ask for what cause, reason, or purpose something happens (Seifert, 1993). This implies a wider contextual frame of being than simply stating that (Y) follows (X) (in most cases, at least) as the point of a why question is to understand (Y) necessitating (X).

For instance, the science teacher imagined earlier who asked how we can tell if a substance is acidic using a pH scale could substitute the “how” for a “why” to make the elaboration more challenging.

In this scenario, the student needs to go beyond pulling their knowledge of acidity and pH scales together by factoring in the amount of actual H+ ions (acidity) floating around in the solution, which is directly related to the definition of an acid.

Now they will need to articulate something along the lines of: “If the pH of a solution is less than 7, it is acidic. If the pH is 7, the solution is neutral and if the pH is greater than 7, the solution is basic. The reason it will be greater than pH 7 is due to a larger concentration of H+ ions in the solution.”

 

How can we ask ‘why’?

Shaun Allison (2019), writing for the Royal Society of Chemistry, gives some good examples of explanatory prompts which can be asked in order uncover the reasons why something is so:

  • “Why does it make sense?”
  • “Why is this true?”
  • “Why is (X) true and not (Y)?”

Additionally, we can ask:

  • “Why does (X) cause (Y)?”
  • “Why is it that (X) is the case in this situation (and not others)?”
  • “Why does (X) disagree with…?”
  • “Why do we need to know this?”
  • Or we can simply ask: “Why?”

Of course, students can elaborate verbally, in writing or through discussion with partners or groups. Whatever format however, I would always suggest giving them adequate thinking time in anticipation of a response.

 

Is elaborating “why” harder than “how”?

I would say yes because how is basically a question of observation. Although researchers, teachers and students can elaborate in extensive detail about how something works and functions, interrogating why involves knowledge of additional facts or ideas potentially beyond the observed phenomena. Depending on the curriculum subject and context, asking why requires students to make inferential assumptions and hypotheses to understand why something happens.

The use of elaborative-interrogation through why questions can also promote “relational processing” of seemingly unrelated or dissociated facts, objects, or ideas.

Relational processing is a type of elaboration that relates the components of text, or similar body of observable knowledge, together. Although researchers have found that requiring learners to answer why questions about technical prose can effectively increase the level of factual learning from that text (Woloshyn et al, 1990), it has also been suggested that the acquisition of factual information through why prompted elaborative-interrogation supports inferencing beyond stated or observed facts (McDaniel & Donnelly, 1996).

Furthermore, the process of figuring out, and elaborating on, the answer to questions that include a limited level of uncertainty can enhance learning (Overoye & Storm, 2015; Weinstein et al, 2018).

Subsequently, I would argue that why questions are exponentially harder to answer than how as students need to interpret, analyse, and extrapolate meaning from the observation that is, basically, how. For me, this is elaborative-interrogation.

Having said that, how questions are no less important to the greater scheme of things, which is evident when we say: “I understand how and why…”

Therefore, like a toddler getting to grips with the world, keep asking how and, most importantly, why.

Andrew Jones is assistant headteacher at The Reach Free School in Hertfordshire. Follow him on X (Twitter) @abowdenj and find his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/andrew-jones

 

Further information & references