My dear Donna,
Since you were nice to me, I'll be concomitantly nice to you in return.
While you know nothing about oven repair, I must admire your tenacity and desire. Most of the responses are from technicians like Smitty who simply mindlessly replace the part and move on with their lives, never taking the time or mental effort to dig down into they who-what-where- when-or-why. Their fix-it-and-be-done-with-it approach takes about fifteen minutes to complete so they can not comprehend why you are taking longer than they would for something so simple as replacing a heater element.
A LOT of repairs (probably 95% of all repairs) are done this replace- parts-one-by-one-until-the-system-works-again method so their approach has merit.
You can't count the number of times I've overheard the conversation "My cooling system is overheating. What shall I do?" with the fifteen- minute response being "just replace the thermostat". Don't think. Just replace. Ask a question or two like "where is it" and "what is the part number" but nothing more than that. Certainly don't take apart any failed item to understand why it failed. Why does it matter. It failed. You replaced it. What more is there to know. That is the Smitty mentality. There is nothing wrong with this move-on-with-your- life mentality. You just don't have it.
Only a few repairs (probably less than 5%) are done using a systematic and forensic approach which you seem to lean toward.
The systematic approach takes far longer than fifteen minutes and requires adequate documentation of the particulars. Many picayune questions need to be asked and answered. Far more than you've asked so far. Almost always, the errant part needs to be destroyed and the pieces analyzed to determine the true sequence of events and ultimate cause of the failure, which will suggest the appropriate solution. Most advances in knowledge are by this approach.
Most work is done by the fifteen-minute approach. Most advances are done by the systematic approach. You chose. You lose.This is not the message board for the systematic approach. We don't know how it works. And we don't care. We fix it. We get paid. We move on. You should too.
If you insist on the systemic approach, then you will find very few people here who have the patience to help you. Most don't want to admit they have no clue as all they do is remove two bolts and they're done. They can't comprehend why you still have questions after removing those two bolts.
My advice to you is for you to put the two bolts back in, plug the oven in, and if it works, you'll know as much as 95% of the people who responded to your initial question. If you insist on trying to figure out what happened, I suggest you post a closeup photograph of the element at the point of failure. I suspect you'll find the typical spiral pattern of the failed element burning through the metal casing and arcing to the oven itself until the power failed.
If you wish to better understand how the heater element works, I suggest as others have done, that you hack saw through both the failed and pristing section where you'll see the spiral pattern of the element embedded in the sintered ceramic surrounded by high temperature steel which will have failed at the point of arcing, in a barber-shop spiral down your element.
I no longer think you're a ditz. You're just different, in a sickly sweet nice kind of way!