Week 7 Session: Explain it two ways
Produce the same explanation for two genuinely different audiences or problems, then use the transfer-of-learning literature to decide what the pair actually shows.
5 April 2027
Where Week 6 left us#
Week 6 changed the resources available during a performance. This week keeps attention on the idea but changes its form: audience, representation or problem. It tests a different ladder assumption: that an Explanation-rung response reflects an adaptable model rather than a rehearsed form. Our new fictional example supplies the background it needs.
Purpose and preparation#
This self-guided activity applies Week 7’s lesson. Allow 25 minutes. All required information is below. Work alone; a solo version is given for the partner step. No specialist knowledge, paid tool or AI account is required. Kavi and the loan example from the lecture are fictional teaching material, not data about you.
Choose one concept you already feel reasonably confident about, from any subject — a hobby, a subject you study, something you learned recently for its own sake. Write its name down before you start; you will return to the same concept in every step.
1. First form: explain it plainly — 6 minutes#
Write a short explanation of your chosen concept, as you would give it to someone with no background in the topic at all. Aim for four to six sentences. Use an analogy if one helps, but make sure the explanation would let a genuine newcomer follow the idea, not just recognise that you know words associated with it.
Keep this explanation; you will compare it against your second attempt.
2. Second form: a harder question — 8 minutes#
Now write a second, separate performance of the same underlying idea, but in a form your first explanation does not cover. Pick whichever of these changes the form the most for your concept:
- Change the audience: explain it to someone who already knows the general area and would ask a sharper, more technical question.
- Change the representation: turn your explanation into a worked example, a comparison of two cases, or a diagram description, instead of prose.
- Change the problem: use the idea to answer a question you did not address the first time — apply it, defend it against an objection, or compare it with a near neighbour that is often confused with it.
Write three to six sentences or a short worked example. Do this before reading further; comparing too early defeats the purpose.
3. Compare the two performances — 6 minutes#
Answer these questions in writing, using both performances you just wrote.
Compare after attempting both performances
There is no single correct pair of answers here — the check is whether your second performance actually did new work. Ask yourself:
- Did the second performance restate the first one in different words, or did it use the underlying relationship to do something the first performance never had to do?
- Could someone who only memorised your first explanation, without understanding the mechanism behind it, have produced your second performance too? If yes, the change of form has not yet told you anything new.
- Is there a specific claim in the second performance that only follows if the underlying idea, not just its surface description, is correctly held? Name it.
Kavi’s lecture example gives a worked case: the sibling explanation (“interest earns interest, like a snowball”) was fluent but reused verbatim by a version of Kavi that then reasoned incorrectly about a new comparison. A version that instead used the mechanism — more compounding events raise the total, not smaller individual amounts — reached the right answer for the right reason. The difference between the two was visible only once the form changed.
4. What the comparison does and does not establish — 3 minutes#
Write two sentences: one naming what your two performances together support about your own understanding of the concept, and one naming what they still do not establish. If your second performance was itself something you had produced before in a similar shape — a comparison you had already thought through, an audience you regularly explain this to — say so; a form that is new to a stranger is not necessarily new to you, and that changes what the pair is evidence of.
5. Name the next form — 2 minutes#
Barnett and Ceci’s taxonomy for transfer distinguishes several ways a new context can differ from the original: domain, audience, representation, and several others. Name one dimension your two performances did not vary, and describe briefly what a third performance, changed along that dimension, would need to show that the first two do not.
For the source behind this week’s distinction, read Barnett and Ceci (2002), “When and Where Do We Apply What We Learn? A Taxonomy for Far Transfer”, and ask which of their nine dimensions your own pair of performances actually changed.
Working alone or with a partner#
Working alone, write both performances yourself and use the questions above as your own check — you lose an independent reader’s judgement of whether the second performance was genuinely different, but you can still be honest about whether you reused the first explanation’s structure.
Working with a partner, have them read only your first performance, then set you the harder question or new representation themselves, without telling you in advance what it will be. This is closer to Kavi’s colleague and gives a form neither of you pre-arranged — record whether this changed how confident you are in your own answer compared with the solo version.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- write a plain explanation of a chosen concept for a no-background audience
- produce a second, genuinely different-form performance of the same concept
- compare the two against a fixed set of questions and record what each supports
- name one further form that would test the idea further, and why