Why Do Students Describe When We Ask Them to Explain?

The familiar problem

In Geography classrooms up and down the country, teachers feel their soul leave their body as yet another student describes a causal relationship, process or mechanism when the exam question has explicitly asked them to explain.

Sometimes the description is short because the student simply does not know what else to write. At other times, students throw more description at the problem because they know the answer needs developing, but they are not yet secure in the difference between describing what happens and explaining why it happens.

There is geographical knowledge here. The student knows that erosion and deposition are involved and that the result is a more sinuous channel. However, the explanation is missing the relationships and processes that connect those ideas.

So why does this happen so consistently, and what can we do to help students move from description to genuine geographical explanation?

Description and explanation are different kinds of thinking

AQA defines the command words as follows:

Describe: Set out characteristics.

Explain: Set out purposes or reasons (AQA’s accompanying guidance adds ‘say why or how’).

At its simplest, then, description identifies what is happening and/or what something is like. Explanation, however, goes further by showing why something happens or how one thing produces another.

In Geography, this usually means the student should make the causes, processes and relationships explicit. The defining feature of explanation is therefore not its length, nor the presence of words such as because or therefore, but whether the student has actually shown the mechanism connecting one geographical idea to another.

If we look back at the example in the introduction, I suspect the student believes they are explaining when they write: ‘Erosion forms a meander by wearing away the side of the river.’ They have, after all, provided something that sounds like a reason.

But look more closely and very little has actually been explained. We are essentially told that erosion occurs and that erosion involves the wearing away of the river bank. We are not told why erosion is concentrated on that side of the channel, what causes it to be greater there, or how this contributes to the development of the meander. The student has added relevant geographical knowledge without making the causal relationship explicit.

Ultimately, the question we need to ask is: has the student shown what connects the cause to the outcome?

If the answer is no, then explanation has not yet taken place.

What does AQA reward when explanation is done well?

That distinction between description and explanation is reflected consistently in AQA mark schemes.

For example, the mark scheme for the meander question used earlier describes stronger responses as showing clear understanding of the ‘interrelationships between river environments and processes’, with explanations that are ‘developed’. Its guidance refers to ‘linked statements’, the ‘processes involved’ and the ‘sequence of formation’, while the indicative content describes explanation as a ‘reasoned account of how and why meanders develop’.

Across both physical and human geography, AQA repeatedly rewards developed explanations built from linked statements.

In physical geography, this often involves processes and sequence; in human geography, the emphasis is often more strongly on relationships and links between factors and outcomes.

The assessment language reinforces the same idea: strong explanation is not simply more information. It is information that has been connected logically so that the reader can see how one geographical factor, process or stage relates to another. Taken together, this recurring language gives us a useful picture of what AQA recognises as successful explanation, even if it is not itself an official definition.

The command-word problem across subjects

It’s little wonder some students struggle with explanation.

Students encounter the word ‘explain’ across the curriculum, but the thinking it demands is not always identical.

In English Language, explanation may involve giving reasons or considering how a writer’s language choices create particular effects. In Geography, the same command word more often requires the student to explain how a cause, process or relationship produces an outcome. That difference matters.

A student may understand the everyday meaning of explain and still be unsure what counts as a successful geographical explanation. The issue is therefore not simply whether students know the command word, but whether they understand the disciplinary form of thinking that sits behind it.

In other words, students need to learn not just what explain means, but what explanation looks like in Geography.

Why students default to description

Taking all of this into account, why do students apparently default to description when faced with a question that requires them to explain? Well, it seems to me that three factors are particularly important, with one, some or all of them potentially playing a role.

1) Possibly the most obvious issue is that students know the facts without securely understanding, or expressing, the relationships between them. For example, when learning urbanisation and informal settlements, a student might know all of these facts:

• cities in LICs/NEEs are growing rapidly;

• rural–urban migration contributes to that growth;

• housing supply often cannot keep pace;

• informal settlements develop;

• these areas may have poor access to water, sanitation and secure housing.

So, the knowledge is clearly there. However, if the student is asked:

Explain why rapid urban growth can lead to the development of informal settlements.

they might write something like:

“Cities are growing quickly because lots of people move there. There are not enough houses, so informal settlements develop. These often have poor sanitation and water supply.”

This is factually relevant, but the causal relationships have only been partially expressed. The student has jumped from rapid growth to informal settlements without really unpacking the mechanism.

A stronger explanation would make the links explicit, by expressing how the information connects together causally.

For example:

rapid population growth → housing demand rises faster than formal housing supply → poorer migrants cannot afford or access formal housing → people build or occupy unofficial housing → informal settlements expand

And that is what I mean by knowing the facts without necessarily being able to understand or express the relationships between them securely.

The student may possess the right pieces of geographical knowledge; the difficulty lies in understanding or expressing how those pieces connect causally.

2) Of course, there is also the possibility that students simply find explanation more cognitively demanding than description.

Description often allows students to retrieve relevant knowledge.

For example:

‘The outside bend is eroded and the inside bend experiences deposition.’

Here, the student has retrieved two relevant and accurate facts. Explanation, however, requires them to do more with that knowledge.

They have to consider where velocity is greater, why that matters, what process follows from it, and how those processes contribute to the development of the meander.

In other words, explanation requires students not only to recall knowledge, but to select, connect and sequence it.

This helps explain why students sometimes fall back into description when under pressure. Description may feel cognitively safer. If they are unsure of the mechanism, they can still write down accurate facts they remember.

3) Finally, writing frames can help students organise an explanation, but they can also give weak reasoning the appearance of sophistication.

A sentence containing because or therefore is not necessarily explanatory if the mechanism linking cause and outcome remains unstated.

For example:

‘Deforestation increases flooding because there are fewer trees. This means there is more water. Therefore flooding is more likely.’

At first glance, this looks explanatory. The student has used causal connectives and linked ideas together.

However, the crucial geographical processes remain missing. There is no reference to reduced interception, increased surface runoff or faster transfer of water to the river channel.

The problem, then, is not the writing frame itself. It is when the frame becomes a substitute for the geographical thinking it was intended to support.

The missing middle: mechanism

Perhaps the most useful way of thinking about weak explanation is to ask a very simple question:

What happens between these two things?

Take the statement:

‘Heavy rain increases flood risk.’

A student may know that this relationship is true. They may even write:

‘Heavy rainfall increases flood risk because there is lots of water. Therefore flooding is more likely.’

But the crucial part of the explanation is still missing. We have the cause and we have the outcome, but not the mechanism that connects them.

A stronger explanation makes that missing middle visible:

The explanation is not better simply because it is longer. It is better because it exposes the geographical processes that connect one stage to the next.

This is the part students often miss. They can identify the starting point and the end point, but the reasoning that links them remains hidden.

That is why one of the most useful questions we can ask when checking an explanation is ‘What happens in between?’

If the student cannot answer that, then the mechanism probably has not yet been explained.

Process explanation needs sequence as well as causality

Not all geographical explanations take exactly the same form. Some are primarily causal: they ask why one factor produces a particular outcome:

Why does deforestation increase flood risk?

Others are more process-based. They ask how something forms, develops or changes over time:

How does a wave-cut platform form?

At first glance, process explanation can seem easier because students often learn it as a sequence of stages. However, simply recalling the stages is not necessarily the same as explaining the process.

A student might write:

‘Waves erode the bottom of the cliff. A wave-cut notch forms. The cliff collapses and eventually a wave-cut platform is left behind.’

The sequence is broadly correct, but much of the explanation is still implicit. Why does erosion become concentrated at the base of the cliff? Why does the notch make the cliff unstable? Why does collapse lead to retreat?

A stronger explanation makes the relationships between the stages explicit. Hydraulic action and abrasion erode the base of the cliff, creating a notch. As the notch enlarges, the rock above becomes unsupported and eventually collapses. Repeated erosion and collapse cause the cliff line to retreat, leaving the former cliff base exposed as a wave-cut platform.

So, just as causal explanation requires students to show what connects a cause to an outcome, process explanation requires them to show why each stage leads to the next.

A sequence tells us what happens. An explanation shows us why the sequence develops in that way.

What teachers can do differently

If the problem is not simply that students forget to use words such as because or therefore, then the solution cannot simply be to remind them to use them more often. Instead, we need to make the thinking behind explanation more visible.

One useful approach is to separate the thinking from the writing. Before asking students to produce a paragraph, we can ask them to build the causal chain or process sequence first. This might involve completing an arrow diagram, arranging stages into order, or identifying the missing link between a cause and an outcome.

The key question then becomes:

What happens between these two things?

Similarly, when students are explaining a process, we can ask:

Why does this stage lead to the next one?

Comparing descriptive and explanatory responses side by side can also be powerful. Rather than simply telling students that one answer is better, we can ask them to identify exactly what has been added: a mechanism, a causal link, a process, or an explanation of why one stage produces another.

None of this means that writing frames or connectives have no value. They can help students organise their thinking. But they should support the thinking rather than substitute for it.

Teaching explanation as geographical thinking

Ultimately, explanation is not just an exam skill. It sits at the heart of geographical thinking.

Geographers are constantly asking why places are unequal, why landscapes change, why some communities are more vulnerable than others, and why the same process can produce different outcomes in different places.

Helping students to explain well therefore means helping them to see relationships, mechanisms and processes more clearly.

That is why the answer is unlikely to be another paragraph structure or another list of connectives. Those things may help students express an explanation, but they cannot replace the thinking itself.

If students continue to describe when we ask them to explain, perhaps the challenge is not simply to improve their writing. Perhaps we need to make the causal thinking that underpins geographical explanation more visible.