How Explaining Others Can Help Us to Learn Better

Today we shall examine and reveal how explaining others can actually benefit us in our understanding and help us study better.  We have noticed that when someone asks us “why?” and you realize that you do not have the required explanation and nervously dive into your material to find the answer and when u do...you experience your “eureka!” moment. Yes that is what I am talking about how explaining others can actually help push us to learning better.

Statistics have shown that majority of the people are able to grasp better verbally, while explaining a concept. The psychological reason being we have an intuitive sense that allows us to grasp more when we explain others however, this intuitive sense is not triggered when we study by ourselves. When a different person enquires, we are forced to shed the false interpretation that we have studied with actual reasoning

Now we move on to explain how making someone understand can benefit both

Teaching acts as a bench mark for both: when a person explains somebody, he will be able to judge how much he has prepared over the time. There will be no false understanding of whether he has covered all portions or not. Secondly the person learning will also be able to know how much he has completed and how much he still has left.

Maximize time utilization: when there are two people together then there is a constant check on each other’s progress. Similarly there is very less time for our imagination to wander off and our concentration stays focused.

The person who is being taught also gets a chance to clear his doubts simultaneously as they move along the syllabus. Here we see how the practice of teaching someone else can benefit both. However, one should realize that group studies or studying with a partner should only be carried out if both are serious because in a situation like this it is very easy to drift.

In a 2010 study it was demonstrated how people dig into all the information available when they have to explain something to a different individual. A practice he would not undertake if he needed the explanation for himself. People through various studies and demonstrations have proved that explaining helps find the underlying principles.

Well there is a lot of mind being underplayed over here. When a person asks you why, he is looking not necessary for the correct answer but an answer that would satisfy his school of thought, the person is looking for an answer that would satisfy him. Similarly when a person asks us why, we equally are aware of whether we can explain it in terms of a broader pattern or principle. Our minds intuitively progress towards these principles.

Often at class rooms or in our day to day lives we tend to overlook deeper explanations in favour of mere observations or even mistake an observation to be an explanation. However when we are asked why, we are then forced to reassess our knowledge.

It is also not necessary that all the people will have the same level of understanding. Moreover it is not required that there can only be one explanation to a particular question. Explanations can be many like your understanding; it has to be the right one.

No matter what you are studying but the moment you use that to teaching someone else it only deepens your understanding of the subject, and the sooner the better.