EXD-REPAIR — Repair what the recipient cannot use without rewriting everything

Situation: An explanation fails in use, and plausible repairs include more subject content, another form or additional help. These changes would contribute different things.

Question: Which repair addresses the actual difficulty, and is it worth its burden compared with the available explanation?

First useful result or blocker: A targeted repair, a sufficient explanation to retain, or the missing subject or reader evidence that prevents choosing between the alternatives.

Start with: EXD.6 - Compare Explanations for the Recipient’s Use and Decide Whether a Repair Is Worthwhile, fixing what the recipient needs to recover and the criterion for using it.

Stop or return: Keep a sufficient explanation when no worthwhile contribution is missing. Repair an explicit false claim from its subject basis; obtain reader evidence when the unresolved question concerns recoverability and the observation can change the choice.

1. Identify the relation that the explanation must supply. Consider a constructed explanation of active effort for one person’s task. Its stated accounting rule counts time actually spent on the task. The draft instead says to subtract start time from handoff time. On an uninterrupted task both rules agree, so that example cannot reveal the error.
2. Use an example that separates the rules. EXD.2 can use work from 09:00 to 10:00 and 11:00 to 12:00, with no task work during the intervening hour. Active effort is two hours; elapsed turnaround is three. The subject definition justifies changing the draft’s rule. EXD.3 can then label separate effort and turnaround columns and place the interruption beside the calculation. Relabelling columns without correcting the rule would leave the content defect in place.
3. Respond to the actual remaining difficulty. If a recipient still counts the interruption, EXD.4 uses that contribution to locate the missing distinction. For a learning purpose, EXD.5 asks the recipient to explain what each interval contributes, provides the needed help, and retries the relation on a relevant changed case. Preserve the first response: a prepared reader may have corrected the false instruction from prior knowledge, and a later correct answer may depend on the supplied help.
4. Choose the conclusion the evidence supports. EXD.6 can justify the rule repair through subject inspection. It cannot attribute an unobserved reading-speed or learning advantage to the new table. If an existing prose account already supplies the correct distinction and serves the receiving task, retain it unless the table offers a worthwhile additional use, such as repeatedly locating corresponding intervals. A comparison of forms keeps the selected claims and help comparable.

If the changed task now concerns several people working concurrently, obtain the population accounting rule before extending the one-person explanation. Layout alone cannot decide how person-hours combine. Evaluation of an instructional material as a whole uses HCD.18/.19; a claim about later human performance, transfer or retention uses the relevant HCD method. The explanatory repair can finish without requiring those stronger conclusions.