The phrase "explanatory tool" is correct and usable in written English.
It refers to an object or method used to explain or clarify something. You can use it in any situation where you want to describe something that helps to clarify or provide further understanding. For example: - The diagram was an effective explanatory tool for understanding the complex scientific concept. - The teacher used various explanatory tools, such as visual aids and hands-on activities, to help her students grasp the difficult math concept. - In his presentation, the speaker used analogies as an explanatory tool to make the topic more relatable to the audience.
But national identity turns out to be an exceedingly weak explanatory tool.
Sometimes, it's hard not to feel that psychology might be as useful an explanatory tool as economics.
But policy makers should discard these dry, unsatisfying academic formulations and start paying attention to a much more powerful explanatory tool: golf.
Hence, it is implied, no divine intervention need be postulated as an explanatory tool.
This is not unusual, since the classification model provided by the decision tree can serve as an explanatory tool to distinguish between objects of different classes [32].
Factor analysis is a useful explanatory tool in multivariate statistical analysis, and it can be applied to discover and interpret relations among variables or to test hypotheses (Ballukraya and Ravi 1999).
As a cardiologist, I have found that Vice President Dick Cheney's cardiac problems have served as explanatory tools for my patients.
However, notice in this case that the reason for resistance is not that the explanatory tools that evolutionary theory provides are ill-fitted to the explanatory task (as saws for hammering, perhaps) but rather that the tools are dangerous.
We can term them "systems," but cells are cells and systems are explanatory tools in a systems theoretical perspective.
Due to this analogy to Waddington's epigenetic landscape, potential landscapes are becoming increasingly popular as explanatory tools in fields such as evo-devo, developmental biology, and especially in stem cell research.
Prevailing frameworks of demographic, epidemiological, and health transitions as descriptive and explanatory tools are beyond reasonable doubt incomplete or irrelevant in the African context on conceptual, methodological, empirical, and policy grounds.
