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Medical training is a key element in maintaining and improving today's healthcare standards. Given the nature of medical work, students must master not only theory but also develop their hands-on abilities and skills in clinical practice. Medical simulators play an increasing role in supporting the active learning of these students due to their ability to present a large variety of tasks allowing students to train and experiment indefinitely without causing any patient harm. While the criticality of explainable AI systems has been extensively discussed in the literature, the medical training context presents unique user needs for explanations. In this paper, we explore the potential gap of current limitations within simulation-based training, and the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds in supporting the needs of medical students in training. Through contextual inquiries and interviews with clinicians in training (N = 9) and subsequent validation with medical experts (N = 4), we obtain an understanding of the shortcomings in current simulation-based training and offer recommendations for future AI-driven training. Our results stress the need for continuous and actionable feedback that resembles the interaction between clinical supervisor and resident in real-world training scenarios while adjusting training material to the residents' skills and prior performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of economics got somewhat puzzling after the crisis of 2008. Many economists now doubt that economics is able to provide answers to some of its core questions. The crisis was not so fun for economics. However, this not so fun image of economics is not the only image in the eyes of the general public. When one looks at economics-made-fun (EMF) books (e.g. Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist, etc.), economics seems to be an explanatory science which is able to provide interesting, unconventional, entertaining and enlightening explanations for almost every aspect of our lives. Isn't there a great contradiction between these two images of economics? Not necessarily. The present paper explicates why. Nevertheless, the paper also shows that EMF books run the risk of creating a false sense of understanding and explains how one should read the basic insights provided by EMF books to remove this risk. The paper contrasts the EMF version of the explanation of the effects of mandatory seat belt laws with actual research concerning the subject to illustrate its arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper details an exploratory qualitative study that investigated 61 prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dissolving salt and sugar in water respectively. The study was set within a 15-week elementary science methods course that included a 5E learning cycle lesson on dissolving, the instructional context. Oversby’s (Prim Sci Rev 63:6–19, 2002 , Aspects of teaching secondary science, Routledge Falmer, London, 2002 ) ladder of explanations for the context of dissolving, current scientific explanations for dissolving and perspectives on conceptions and misconceptions provided the unified framework for the study. Concept maps, interview transcripts, written artifacts, and drawings and narratives were used as data to investigate these prospective teachers’ conceptual understanding of dissolving throughout the 15-weeks of the methods course. Analysis revealed that participants’ explanations of dissolving were predominantly descriptive explanations (39 %) and interpretative explanations (38 %), with lower percentage occurrences of intentional (14 %) and cause and effect (9 %) level explanations. Most of these explanations were also constructed by a set of loosely connected and reinforcing everyday concepts abstracted from common everyday experiences making them misconceptions. Implications include: (1) the need for science teacher educators to use multiple platforms to derive their prospective elementary teachers’ conceptual understandings of science content; and (2) to identify and help them identify their own scientific conceptions and misconceptions and how they influence the construction of scientific/nonscientific explanations. Science teacher educators also need to emphasize the role of meaningful frameworks associated with the concept that is being introduced during the Engage phase of the 5E learning cycle. This is important because, relevant prior knowledge is associated with the knowledge of the particle theory of matter and both are part of larger knowledge system comprised of interrelated scientific concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a network approach to describe the quality of written scientific explanations. Existing approaches evaluate explanations mainly on the level of sentences or as a whole but not on the elementary level of single terms. Moreover, evaluation of explanations is often based on highly inferential scoring techniques. We addressed both issues by converting the elementary structure of terms in explanations into networks (so-called element maps) and analysing these with mathematical measures, thus extracting the size and complexity of an explanation, adequacy, coherence, and use of key terms. A total of 65 explanations of experts and students were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Differences between expert and student maps' measures can be interpreted meaningfully against the background of existing research findings. Thus, we argue that our approach using network analysis provides a precise, fine-grained, and low-inferential tool that complements and refines existing approaches. Element maps have the potential to improve teaching and research by precisely revealing the strengths and weaknesses of explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored whether different types of instructional visuals—knowledge maps and pictorial illustrations—encourage students to focus on specific types of conceptual relationships during learning. Undergraduates (n = 134) studied a text lesson on the human nervous system accompanied by maps (text-with-maps group), illustrations (text-with-illustrations group), or no visuals (text-only group). Then all students orally explained what they learned as if they were teaching a peer. The text-with-maps group generated more hierarchical relationships than the other two groups, and both visual groups generated more temporal relationships than the text-only group. The groups did not significantly differ in the number of structural relationships generated. On a subsequent post-test, only the text-with-maps group significantly outperformed the text-only group, and the two visual groups did not significantly differ from each other. These findings highlight how different visuals affect the types of relationships students focus on when learning from the same text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the instructional discourse of science lessons in two primary classrooms for explanations of bird adaptations for flight. We draw on case study data to describe ways in which student construction of explanations is scaffolded by the teachers. We recognised three categories of explanations developed in the discourse: descriptive explanations, relational explanations and explanatory models. Descriptive explanations predominated. We argue that teachers cannot assume that, although the construction of oral explanations in science lessons may move from descriptive to relational or explanatory models, students will be able to write such explanations without specific attention to text structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically test the effects of explanation facilities on consumers' initial trusting beliefs concerning online recommendation agents (RAs). RAs provide online shopping advice based on user-specified needs and preferences. The characteristics of RAs that may hamper consumers' trust building in the RAs are identified, and the provision of explanation facilities is proposed as a knowledge-based approach to enhance consumers' trusting beliefs by dealing with these obstacles. This study examines the effects of three types of explanations about an RA and its use--how, why, and trade-off explanations--on consumers' trusting beliefs in an RA's competence, benevolence, and integrity. An RA was built as the experimental platform and a laboratory experiment was conducted. The results confirm the important role of explanation facilities in enhancing consumers' initial trusting beliefs and indicate that consumers' use of different types of explanations enhances different trusting beliefs: the use of how explanations increases their competence and benevolence beliefs, the use of why explanations increases their benevolence beliefs, and the use of trade-off explanations increases their integrity beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory research investigates the nature of explanation use and factors that influence it during users' interaction with a knowledge-based system (KBS) for decision-making. It draws upon several cognitive perspectives to help understand when, why, and how explanations are used. A verbal protocol analysis was conducted based on a laboratory experiment involving a KBS for financial analysis. Major categories of explanation use were identified, and accounted for with relevant cognitive perspectives. Results show that explanations were requested to deal with comprehension difficulties caused by various types of perceived anomalies in KBS output. There were qualitative and quantitative differences in the nature and extent of explanation use between novices and experienced professionals. These results offer new insights to why explanations are useful and important, what factors influence explanation use, and what information should be included in explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating explanations is an important process for students, not only to make connections between novel information and background knowledge, but also to be able to communicate their understanding of any given topic. This article explores students' explanations in the context of computational science and engineering, an important interdisciplinary field that enables scientists and engineers to solve complex problems. Specifically, this study explores: (a) students' approaches to create written explanations of programing code and (b) the relationship between students' explanations and their ability to do computer programing. Students wrote in-code comments for 3 MATLAB® worked-examples, which were qualitatively analyzed using a coding scheme. Different approaches to self-explain were identified using hierarchical cluster analysis, and differences in students' ability to do computer programing were identified using analysis of variance. The resulting approaches to self-explain were: original solution, mechanistic, principle-based, limited, and goal-based. The findings suggest that experienced students wrote simple in-code comments to self-explain, but students with lower ability to do computer programing wrote more comprehensive explanations, as they may take this as a learning opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in mathematics education often point to the necessity for students to engage in more cognitively demanding activities than just solving tasks by applying given solution methods. Previous studies have shown that students that engage in creative mathematically founded reasoning to construct a solution method, perform significantly better in follow up tests than students that are given a solution method and engage in algorithmic reasoning. However, teachers and textbooks, at least occasionally, provide explanations together with an algorithmic method, and this could possibly be more efficient than creative reasoning. In this study, three matched groups practiced with either creative, algorithmic, or explained algorithmic tasks. The main finding was that students that practiced with creative tasks did, outperform the students that practiced with explained algorithmic tasks in a post-test, despite a much lower practice score. The two groups that got a solution method presented, performed similarly in both practice and post-test, even though one group got an explanation to the given solution method. Additionally, there were some differences between the groups in which variables predicted the post-test score. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study describes speech codes used by Japanese and English speakers in remedying problematic situations. By analyzing in-depth interviews, the study reveals the Japanese-speaking participants’ use of a code in which offering detailed explanations can be a way to deny having caused another person discomfort, thus being incompatible with their meaning of “apology.” The English-speaking participants used a code in which offering and listening to explanations is a way to show that they care about the relationship and to seek forgiveness. The analysis illustrates how the participants used these codes as a resource to draw a boundary between two speech communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elementary students should have opportunities to develop scientific models to reason and build understanding about how and why plants depend on relationships within an ecosystem for growth and survival. However, scientific modeling practices are rarely included within elementary science learning environments and disciplinary content is often treated as discrete pieces separate from scientific practice. Elementary students have few, if any, opportunities to reason about how individual organisms, such as plants, hold critical relationships with their surrounding environment. The purpose of this design-based research study is to build a learning performance to identify and explore the third-grade students’ baseline understanding of and their reasoning about plant–ecosystem relationships when engaged in the practices of modeling. The developed learning performance integrated scientific content and core scientific activity to identify and measure how students build knowledge about the role of plants in ecosystems through the practices of modeling. Our findings indicate that the third-grade students’ ideas about plant growth include abiotic and biotic relationships. Further, they used their models to reason about how and why these relationships were necessary to maintain plant stasis. However, while the majority of the third-grade students were able to identify and reason about plant–abiotic relationships, a much smaller group reasoned about plant–abiotic–animal relationships. Implications from the study suggest that modeling serves as a tool to support elementary students in reasoning about system relationships, but they require greater curricular and instructional support in conceptualizing how and why ecosystem relationships are necessary for plant growth and development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explanation studies underlined the importance of using evidence in support of claims. However, few studies have focused on students' use of others' data (second-hand data) in this process. In this study, students collected data from a local water source and then took all the data back to the classroom to create scientific explanations by using claim–evidence–reasoning model on a new mobile application. A middle school science teacher from a Midwest town participated with four sixth-grade classes. After collecting their own data from a local water source, students created explanations by analyzing the data they collected (first-hand data), and by analyzing existing data set collected by another school from another river (second-hand data). By analyzing the health of these two water sources, students created two scientific explanations. Students participating in this study created stronger explanations when analyzing the data they generated (first-hand data). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two self-report experiments examined how religiosity affects attributions made for a target person’s death. Online adults (Study 1,N= 427) and undergraduate students (Study 2,N= 326) read about Chris who had a heart attack, used religious or health behaviors, and lived or died. Participants made attributions to Chris and God (both studies), and reported their emotions (Study 2). Participants made more attributions to Chris when he lived than when he died, but only when he used health behaviors. The highly religious made more attributions to God, but not when Chris used religious behaviors and died (theGod-serving bias); they reported the most positive emotions when Chris lived after using religious behaviors (theHallelujah effect). Directions for future research in terms of implicit religious beliefs and normative evaluations of religion are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The features of a concept or principle an individual chooses to highlight in an explanation or description may be related to the medium of communication used. Different aspects of understanding can be revealed through words and through drawings. This two-part exploratory study examined the differences between explanations of physical and chemical equilibria generated by means of words or pictures. Participants included both instructors and students, who were randomly assigned to provide either written explanations or drawings of physical or chemical equilibrium at the macroscopic and particulate levels. For both studies, analyses revealed that significantly different features appeared in the written and pictorial explanations of equilibrium. The written responses focused more on processes such as the dynamic nature of equilibrium, whereas pictorial representations highlighted structural aspects of equilibrium, such as the spatial arrangement of molecules. Regardless of the level of chemistry knowledge, people conveyed the same type of information via the use of different representations and visual tools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report on a study investigating the relationship between cognitive ability grouping, reflective inquiry scaffolding, and students’ collaborative explanations of an ecosystem disturbance which took place when a number of flamingo birds died in a salt lake because of nearby intensive human activities. Twenty-six pairs of students from two intact sixth-grade classes participated in the study. All students investigated scientific data relating to the ecosystem problem using a web-based learning environment. One class was provided with web-based reflective inquiry scaffolding (WorkSpace), while the other class used PowerPoint. The main data analyzed for this study consisted of each pair’s written explanation and task-related artifacts. Findings show that the web-based reflective scaffolding supported students in providing valid evidence in support of their explanations. The analyses of the students’ collaborative explanations showed no statistically significant differences that could be attributed to prior achievement between students in the WorkSpace condition, while differences were found between the different cognitive ability pairs in the PowerPoint class. These findings suggest that the WorkSpace scaffolding may have provided more influential support to lower cognitive ability pairs in creating evidence-based explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given humans' need to understand why things go wrong, “offering an explanation” is a type of service recovery effort that can be essential in the recovery process. Despite the importance of service failure explanations to academics and practitioners, research on this topic is scant. To bridge that gap, this study investigates the impact of various types of failure explanations on customer perceptions of informational fairness in the context of air travel. The results show that the type of explanation and the severity of the failure both result in different levels of perceived informational fairness. Moreover, different levels of perceived informational fairness can influence customer satisfaction through reduced attribution of responsibility for the failure to the service provider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the impact of four types of explanations following a tourism service failure. Written scenarios were used to orthogonally manipulate explanation type and failure magnitude. Both independent variables had significant effects on customer satisfaction and justice perceptions. Apologies yielded more favorable outcomes than did referential accounts. Specific forms of justice mediated the effects of three explanation types. This research links different explanation types to different forms of justice, thereby shedding light not only on what types of explanations assist most with service recovery, but also on how they have their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]