Bridging Principles and Examples through Analogy and Explanations

How can we accelerate student learning and understanding of the conceptual relations between principles and examples? Previous research has shown that students typically have a difficult time acquiring deep conceptual understanding in domains like mathematics and physics and often rely on textbook examples to solve new problems. Although using prior examples facilitates student learning they often can only use that knowledge on very similar problems (Reeves & Weissberg, 1994). One reason students may rely so heavily on using prior examples is that they lack a deep understanding for the relations between the principles and examples. That is, they do not understand how the principles are instantiated in the examples. The purpose of the current work is to test the hypothesis that learning the relations between principles and examples is critical to deep understanding and transfer. There are at least two paths to acquiring these relations. The first path is through self-explaining how worked examples are related to the principles. The second path is learning a schema through analogical comparison of two examples and then relating that schema to the principle. These hypotheses are tested in a variety of laboratory and in vivo experiments in Statistics and Physics domains.

Collaborators:

Kurt VanLehn (University of Pittsburgh)