Heike M. Buhl (A01 and A04) and Ingrid Scharlau (A05, C01, C04 und RTG) organized a symposium on “Explaining - The active role of explainers and addressees” at the International Congress of Psychology in Prague. Speakers came from the fields of educational psychology, general psychology, and didactics.
Ingrid Scharlau argued that common metaphors for explaining do not support the co-constructive understanding of explaining on which the TRR is based. This might be one reason why the co-constructive view is so uncommon and would call for attention to metaphors.
Heike M. Buhl showed results on how explainers' partner models change depending on the moves that explainees make in their dialogues. This is one first proof of the co-construction that the TRR assumes to take place in explaining. The TRR focus of these talks was complemented by two talks from the domain of didactics that showed how construction and contextualization work in explaining. Heike Russ from Tübingen University showed how drawing in peer-explanations at school benefits learning. Madeleine Hörnlein of Paderborn University asked how learning with explanatory videos can be effective and what contribution a suitable embedding in learning tasks can make to the acquisition of physical conceptual knowledge. These contributions also emphasized the role of constructive processes in explaining. With this broad focus, the two organizers also want to work to ensure that the topic of explaining, which is more of a niche topic in psychology, receives more attention.
