Learning by explaining orally or in written form? Text complexity matters

Abstract

In this experiment, we examined whether text difficulty moderates the effect of the modality of explaining on students’ learning. Students (N = 115) read a high-difficult and a low-difficult text. Additionally, students generated either a written or an oral explanation. A control group of students retrieved the content. For the low-difficult text, we found no significant differences between conditions. For the high-difficult text, however, oral explaining yielded better comprehension than writing explanations. The retrieval condition showed the lowest performance. Mediation analyses revealed that the effect of explaining modality was mediated by the number of personal references and the comprehensiveness of the generated explanations. Our findings suggest that the effect of explaining modality emerges when students are required to learn from difficult text materials. Furthermore, the findings show that oral explaining is effective, as it triggers distinct generative processes due to increased social presence during explaining.

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