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A New Idea to Promote Transfer

2/11/2018

 
It's one of the most familiar (and frustrating) problems teachers encounter. Students learn something new (say, a standard solution technique for a standard mathematical problem) but then fail to recognize the problem type when they encounter it again. For example, students may learn the idea of a "common factor" in equation form in an algebra class and fail to see that the same idea can be applied in a word problem. 

This is usually called the problem of transfer, and a classic laboratory problem was devised by Mary Gick & Keith Holyoak. 

Picture

It's a difficult problem, and most people are unable to solve it. If I tell you that this story may provide some inspiration, you'll probably get it. 

Picture

The interesting finding re: transfer is that if you simply ask people to read the military story and then to try to solve the radiation problem, most people don't see the analogy. They have no problem seeing it when told to look. But they don't spontaneously see it. And of course there's usually not someone around to give you a gentle elbow in the ribs, and drop a hint. You have to think of it on your own. 

This problem has proven very difficult to solve. One promising solution is to give subjects something to do that forces them to focus on the underlying structure of the problem. The underlying structure in the example above is "to avoid collateral damage, disperse your forces and converge at the point of attack." The underlying structure is expressed with tumors and rays in the problem and via a fortress and armies in the story. 

Dedre Gentner and her collaborators have tried (with some success) to improve transfer by asking people to compare problems. When you compare problems with the same deep structure, that obviously focuses attention on that deep structure and so you'll remember it better later.

A disadvantage of comparison is that the instructor must provide parallel versions for all problems. Ricardo Minervino and his colleagues sought a technique that would provide similar benefits, but might be more applicable to classroom situations.

In their experiment, subjects first read the fortress-army story (along with two other stories). At transfer, everyone was asked to solve the tumor-rays problem, but one group was also first asked to invent an analogous problem. Examples of the problems subjects invented appear below:

Picture

Subjects who invented an analogous problem were more likely to successfully solve the radiation problem compared to subjects not asked to invent a problem, 25% vs 10%. Independent raters judged the quality of the invented problems as analogous to the target problem, and further analysis showed that the better the analogy they created, the more likely they were to solve the target.

The experimenters also showed that it wasn't just the deeper thought required by the problem creation that made those subjects more likely to get the problem right. Another control group was given the tumor-rays problem and were asked to create an analogous problem before solving it, but they did not read the fortress-army story beforehand. Just 10% of these subjects solved the radiation problem.

In terms of the psychological mechanism behind this effect, it's not a huge surprise. Again, it's a technique that prompts people to focus attention on the deep structure, just as comparison does. What's nice about this technique is that, as the authors note, it removes the burden from the instructor to devise parallel problems. But that also gives students the freedom to create an "analogous" problem that isn't really analogous. So the instructor needs to check up on the problems students create.

Still, it's useful to know about the consequences when students create a new problem, and teachers may find it useful in some contexts
Susan Jones
2/12/2018 10:39:21 am

I suspect that putting language into describing the structures ('break up the force and apply smaller forces in different places") could also help that transfer.

Dylan Kane link
2/12/2018 04:34:15 pm

This sounds really interesting to me as a math teacher. I can imagine an additional benefit. If I ask students to write analogous problems for a particular topic, it seems that students who write problems that most effectively capture the deep structure are most likely to transfer their knowledge. I can then use this information as formative assessment to figure out which students best understand the deeper structure, and use that information to adjust my teaching in the future.

Abigail
2/14/2018 09:26:08 am

So, what's the answer? I was thinking you could do an endoscopy, but that doesn't seem to match the intent of the article. Are they saying that you could shoot several low-energy rays at the tumor from different directions and that would solve the problem? That doesn't make sense. I'm no physicist, but I don't think rays are going to converge and combine their energies when they arrive at the tumor. ?

Dan willingham
2/14/2018 10:32:29 am

yes, shoot several low-energy rays from different directions. I also thought that sounded like it wouldn't work, and then I found out that the technique is actually used in some medical cases like this....that was the inspiration for the problem.

Francesco Rocchi
2/15/2018 02:47:48 am

I knew the example of the tumour/fortress, but while I do see the logic of the whole concept, I found the example itself a little misleading.

When it comes to tactics, dispersing forces and having them attack in small groups is a very bad idea -or at least that's what I've learned from my amateurish readings.

Thus, the fortress parallel led my astray. That is to say that analogous examples must be chosen very carefully and that we cannot expect our learners to smoothly follow the path our analogy should have taken them to*.

Minervino's approach bypasses this brilliantly, as the analogy needs not to be "real" but just perceived as such by the learner (with some supervision, ok).

*(or maybe I was just frustrated I did not see the analogy myself, possibly!)

Amy
2/17/2018 09:11:43 am

I'm in Montessori elementary training right now and, as I'm sure you know, a lot of this is built into the way we operate: children create their own problems in math, they are offered keys to underlying structure in history and science, there is great deal of integration between the subjects, etc. I'd like to take this further. Do you know of anyone doing work to apply this principle more fully in a Montessori setting? I also wonder about the developmental limitations, if any? When are children ripe for making these types of analogies?


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