How to give effective explanations: Guidelines for business education, discussion of their scope and their application to teaching operations research

Giving effective instructional explanations is one of the most important teacher competences. Recent didactic literature provides, however, little insight on teacher explanations. In our previous work we developed guidelines for designing comprehensible explanations in the field of business (teacher) education, which are along general lines transferable to other subject areas and target audiences. In this article, we first compare our guidelines to the state of research in general and mathematics didactics. We then investigate their applicability to teaching operations research at university level, based on interviews with professors of the international operations research community.