Questions and Answers (1) View all
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Answer added in Teaching and Learning28 What methods are best in refreshing the research knowledge of university faculty? Are there training programs specifically for this?http://cognitivescience.co/Learn Has resources based on cognitive science research on learning, in case they're useful.
Publications (7) View all
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Article: The Hazards of Explanation: Overgeneralization in the Face of Exceptions.
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ABSTRACT: Seeking explanations is central to science, education, and everyday thinking, and prompting learners to explain is often beneficial. Nonetheless, in 2 category learning experiments across artifact and social domains, we demonstrate that the very properties of explanation that support learning can impair learning by fostering overgeneralizations. We find that explaining encourages learners to seek broad patterns, hindering learning when patterns involve exceptions. By revealing how effects of explanation depend on the structure of what is being learned, these experiments simultaneously demonstrate the hazards of explaining and provide evidence for why explaining is so often beneficial. For better or for worse, explaining recruits the remarkable human capacity to seek underlying patterns that go beyond individual observations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).Journal of Experimental Psychology General 01/2013; · 3.99 Impact Factor -
Article: Explanation and prior knowledge interact to guide learning.
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ABSTRACT: How do explaining and prior knowledge contribute to learning? Four experiments explored the relationship between explanation and prior knowledge in category learning. The experiments independently manipulated whether participants were prompted to explain the category membership of study observations and whether category labels were informative in allowing participants to relate prior knowledge to patterns underlying category membership. The experiments revealed a superadditive interaction between explanation and informative labels, with explainers who received informative labels most likely to discover (Experiments 1 and 2) and generalize (Experiments 3 and 4) a pattern consistent with prior knowledge. However, explainers were no more likely than controls to discover multiple patterns (Experiments 1 and 2), indicating that effects of explanation are relatively targeted. We suggest that explanation recruits prior knowledge to assess whether candidate patterns are likely to have broad scope (i.e., to generalize within and beyond study observations). This interpretation is supported by the finding that effects of explanation on prior knowledge were attenuated when learners believed prior knowledge was irrelevant to generalizing category membership (Experiment 4). This research provides evidence that explanation can serve as a mechanism for deploying prior knowledge to assess the scope of observed patterns.Cognitive Psychology 10/2012; 66(1):55-84. · 4.27 Impact Factor -
Article: The role of explanation in discovery and generalization: evidence from category learning.
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ABSTRACT: Research in education and cognitive development suggests that explaining plays a key role in learning and generalization: When learners provide explanations-even to themselves-they learn more effectively and generalize more readily to novel situations. This paper proposes and tests a subsumptive constraints account of this effect. Motivated by philosophical theories of explanation, this account predicts that explaining guides learners to interpret what they are learning in terms of unifying patterns or regularities, which promotes the discovery of broad generalizations. Three experiments provide evidence for the subsumptive constraints account: prompting participants to explain while learning artificial categories promotes the induction of a broad generalization underlying category membership, relative to describing items (Exp. 1), thinking aloud (Exp. 2), or free study (Exp. 3). Although explaining facilitates discovery, Experiment 1 finds that description is more beneficial for learning item details. Experiment 2 additionally suggests that explaining anomalous observations may play a special role in belief revision. The findings provide insight into explanation's role in discovery and generalization.Cognitive Science A Multidisciplinary Journal 07/2010; 34(5):776-806. · 2.59 Impact Factor -
Article: Explanation Constrains Learning, and Prior Knowledge Constrains Explanation
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ABSTRACT: A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner's prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on learning, that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation's effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). -
Article: Why does explaining help learning? Insight from an explanation impairment effect
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ABSTRACT: Engaging in explanation, even to oneself, can enhance learning. What underlies this effect? Williams & Lombrozo (in press) propose that explanation exerts subsumptive constraints on processing, driving learners to discover underlying patterns. A category-learning experiment demonstrates that explanation can enhance or impair learning depending on whether these constraints match the structure of the material being learned. Explaining can help learning when reliable patterns are present, but actually impairs learning when patterns are misleading. This explanation impairment effect is predicted by the subsumptive constraints account, but challenges alternative hypotheses according to which explaining helps learning by increasing task engagement through motivation, attention, or processing time. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications for learning and education.
