Self-explanation

Student life involves a high degree of sacrifice and dedication, since our brain must face a series of challenges every day in order to acquire a variety of new knowledge and skills. For this reason, a series of techniques and methods have been developed that seek to make this whole process much simpler and more effective, making study days more enjoyable and enhancing their performance.

Self-explanation is one of the most powerful and effective learning techniques that exist, many of us have come to resort to it instinctively. Within the study techniques it is one of the most practical utilities, since it can be used to assimilate any content or subject in a practical and simple way.

Next we will analyze the basic concepts that revolve around self-explanation as a study technique, taking into account the importance given to it as a tool of great value during the learning process.

What does it consist of?

Self-explanation, as its name suggests, is based on explaining a certain question or element to oneself. To do so, a methodology is used that goes from the reading and understanding of what we are studying, to the simplification of this new knowledge that must be interpreted and expressed in our own words as a sign of mastery of the content.

The mere fact of having to explain something makes us think about the elements we master or ignore. So self-explaining is a simple way to check the contents, allowing us to know in advance the points we must reinforce through study and those we already master.

Effectiveness

As we said at the beginning, this is one of the most effective study techniques that exist. This is due to all the interactions and logical processes that we are forced to perform before explaining a given content. First, the student must read, interpret and thoroughly understand what he or she is studying. Subsequently, the technical-scientific language received must be simplified to a colloquial and pleasant one.

The idea is that when explaining, the student should use his own language; it is not desired that he uses technical concepts or words, the closer this language is to the one he uses in his daily conversations, the more effective the technique will be. This is because when we take the technical language to the colloquial, we are giving a sign of mastery, we are able to use synonyms and adapt the knowledge so that it is easy to understand for anyone.

Once we find ourselves explaining a content, it will be very easy to realize if there are aspects that we have not yet mastered well. This is because if we are honest with ourselves, it wil