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Explaining may seem, at first, like an activity directed toward someone else. Someone asks a question, we organise an answer, and we try to move an idea across the distance between two minds. But there is an earlier, quieter consequence: to explain, we have to find out what we actually understand.
When knowledge has to leave the head, it stops being only a feeling of familiarity. It needs order, words, relationships and examples. That movement is where gaps become visible — and where a loose piece of information can begin to form a structure.
Knowledge changes when it has to leave your head
Reading a page and recognising its terms can create the impression that learning has happened. That impression is not useless, but it is fragile. The text is already organised by someone else; following its sequence can make our understanding seem larger than it is.
Explaining introduces a small resistance. We have to choose where to begin, separate the essential from the detail, say what causes what, and notice which words are still being used to protect us from uncertainty. A memorised answer may survive for a few minutes. An explanation has to support its own connections.
This does not mean every explanation must be long or brilliant. A simple sentence connecting two ideas can do more for understanding than an entire page reread without interruption. The gain is reconstruction: instead of merely receiving a sequence, we try to produce it.
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What does learning science observe?
A 2009 study by Chase, Chin, Oppezzo and Schwartz examined what became known as the protégé effect. In a learning environment called Betty’s Brain, students who prepared to teach a digital agent invested more effort and performed better on some measures than students who studied only for a test.
The result does not say that teaching always works, or that an audience transforms every study session. It suggests that expecting to explain may change how a learner selects, organises and checks the material.
A 2019 meta-analysis by Kobayashi found an average advantage for preparing to teach and a larger advantage when preparation was followed by teaching itself. The effects depended on the task design. That last part matters: the evidence supports a tendency under particular conditions, not a universal recipe.
Fiorella and Mayer, in 2013, observed something similar when comparing the expectation of teaching with actually teaching. Expecting to teach helped immediate learning; actually teaching was associated with a more persistent advantage on a test taken a week later. The difference reminds us that the activity’s context and the opportunity to retrieve knowledge matter too.
These studies do not measure an abstract quality called intelligence. They measure tasks, groups, materials and moments. Their interest lies in showing how an apparently social action — teaching — can change the cognitive work of the learner.
Explaining to yourself counts too
You do not need a class, a board or a patient listener to test an explanation. Speaking aloud, writing an answer without looking at the book, or trying to reconstruct each step of a solved example already creates a different situation from passive reading.
In 1989, Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann and Glaser studied the self-explanations students produced while learning physics from solved examples. Their analysis helped show that students who explained to themselves what was happening, why a step made sense, and how one part connected to the next developed a more productive understanding of the material.
Self-explanation is not repeating the text in different words. It is asking what changed, which principle is being used, why the example applies to that situation, and what would happen if one condition were different. When the answer stops, that stop is information too: perhaps a definition, a relationship or an intermediate case is missing.
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A page of questions can be more revealing than a page of summaries. “How would I explain this without using the main term?”, “what is the simplest example?”, and “which part can I still not connect?” make visible work that usually stays hidden.
In medical school, the difference appears quickly
At university, especially in courses filled with new vocabulary, the difference between recognising and understanding appears quickly. A person can follow a lecture, underline a chapter and still be unable to explain the basic sequence of a process.
Trying to teach a topic to a classmate exposes that difference without turning the conversation into a competition. A classmate may ask “why?”, request an example, or point out that two stages have been mixed together. The answer does not have to be perfect to be useful; it has to show where the explanation rests and where it still depends on checking.
There is also particular value in explaining without turning the other person into an audience. Taking turns speaking and asking creates mutual verification. The explainer tests their organisation; the listener offers an outside view, even when they are still learning too.
In medical education, this practice can remind us that naming a structure is not the same as understanding its function, and that understanding a mechanism does not authorise us to simplify a person. The content may be technical; learning remains a situated activity, made with time, language and other people.
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Explaining does not replace studying
There is a temptation to turn a useful strategy into a total rule. If explaining helps, then perhaps teaching everything, always, would solve studying. The evidence does not support that conclusion.
Explaining can reveal gaps, retrieve information and reorganise relationships. We still need to read, observe, practise, compare examples, receive correction and return to the material when memory is not enough. In some subjects, spaced repetition and problem solving have roles that a conversation cannot fulfil on its own.
It is also possible to explain badly. Someone can build a confident story from a mistaken premise, and fluency can hide the error. That is why explaining works best alongside verification: consult a reliable source, check definitions, test a new example and accept correction.
Perhaps that is the best reason to explain. Not because teaching places us above the listener, but because it makes us find the shape of what we think we know. Sometimes the shape holds. Sometimes it breaks halfway through a sentence. In both cases, we learn something about knowledge — and about the next step it asks of us.
Fontes / Sources
- Chase, Chin, Oppezzo & Schwartz (2009), “Teachable agents and the protégé effect”
- Kobayashi (2019), “Learning by preparing to teach and teaching”
- Fiorella & Mayer (2013), “The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy”
- Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann & Glaser (1989), “Self-explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems”
STAY GOLDEN, STAY SENSIBLE.
Victor Lemos — Journalist, Author and Medical Student
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