Instructional Explanation Strategies: A Case Study Of Teaching Strategies In An Associate Degree Programme In Hong Kong

This research study aimed to investigate teachers’ strategies for instructional explanations as a scaffolding approach for supporting conceptual understanding of new knowledge in response to the learning attitudes of community college students in Hong Kong. Adopting an interpretivist research paradigm, a single embedded case study using qualitative methods was implemented. Naturalistic data collected from interviewing the participants, recording actual teaching situations and class observation were coded, analyzed and triangulated. The findings explore the ways college teachers explain new knowledge, reveal the roles of explanations in instructional process and explain the rationales behind the strategies in relation to their perspectives in teaching and about this particular group of students. This study identified various types of instructional explanation strategies and three different explanatory approaches, namely familiarization, visualization and contextualization, which support understanding of different types of declarative, procedural and conceptual knowledge. Instructional explanations are the most prominent scaffolding strategies exercised in content-based lessons. College teachers made use of various tools and strategies to explain new concepts and those explanation strategies were intentionally catered to facilitate students’ understanding. These approaches reflected teachers’ experiences, beliefs and their perspectives on the learning background of Hong Kong students, their attitudes to learning and their perceived needs in the transition years of the college life. Despite this, instructional explanations were still overlooked as a vital and essential strategies even though participants put much of the time in class providing explanations.