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Relational Categories as a Bridge Between Cognitive and Educational Research

American Psychological Association
Psychological Bulletin
Authors:
Micah B Goldwater at The University of Sydney
Micah B Goldwater
Lennart Schalk at Schwyz University of Teacher Education
Lennart Schalk
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Abstract

Both cognitive and educational psychology literature strive to investigate human category and concept learning. However, both literatures focus on different phenomena and often use different methodologies. We identify and discuss commonalities and differences between the literatures. This literature comparison reveals that research on relational category learning offers a promising avenue to integration. We suggest that this integration would be especially beneficial to advance our understanding of conceptual change essentially, how complex scientific concepts and categories are acquired and developed in educational contexts elaborating or correcting students' prior conceptions. Furthermore, the focus on relational categories allows us to provide an integrative discussion on how recent lines of research on analogy, memory and category learning, and knowledge restructuring relate to and can inform education. In general, this article advocates the complementary nature of cognitive and educational psychology and identifies viable, and potentially synergistic paths for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Relational Categories as a Bridge Between Cognitive and
Educational Research
Micah B. Goldwater
The University of Sydney
Lennart Schalk
ETH Zurich
Both cognitive and educational psychology literature strive to investigate human category and concept
learning. However, both literatures focus on different phenomena and often use different methodologies.
We identify and discuss commonalities and differences between the literatures. This literature compar-
ison reveals that research on relational category learning offers a promising avenue to integration. We
suggest that this integration would be especially beneficial to advance our understanding of conceptual
change essentially, how complex scientific concepts and categories are acquired and developed in
educational contexts elaborating or correcting students’ prior conceptions. Furthermore, the focus on
relational categories allows us to provide an integrative discussion on how recent lines of research on
analogy, memory and category learning, and knowledge restructuring relate to and can inform education.
In general, this article advocates the complementary nature of cognitive and educational psychology and
identifies viable, and potentially synergistic paths for future research.
Keywords: conceptual change, relational categories, STEM education, analogy, categorization
Category and concept learning have long traditions in the cog-
nitive and educational psychology research. Despite the similar
general aims of understanding how humans learn and reason,
cognitive and educational psychologists have largely focused on
different phenomena, often using different methods of research,
and targeting different communities of readers. The goal of this
article is to discuss how cognitive and educational psychologists
study category and concept learning to uncover where research
approaches have diverged, but more importantly, to also advance
a novel integration of the two literatures. We reveal that despite
apparent differences, there are great opportunities for each of these
literatures to inform the other and that a stronger alignment opens
up exciting avenues for future research.
Cognitive psychologists have investigated the learning and
representation of categories, and how knowledge of categories
serves as the basis for induction and deduction since decades
(see Murphy, 2002, for review). Typically, simple perceptual or
linguistic stimuli have been used in learning tasks with upward
of multiple hundreds of trials. These tasks afford the precise
tracking and characterization of learning and performance over
time as the learner amasses experience (admittedly, often within
the convenient confines of a single hour-long laboratory ses-
sion). This precise characterization of performance is excep-
tionally useful as it allows, for example, to develop precise
cognitive models to computationally simulate learning pro-
cesses (e.g., Erickson & Kruschke, 1998;Kurtz, 2007;Love,
Medin, & Gureckis, 2004), or to distinguish engagement of
multiple brain regions (e.g., Ashby & Maddox, 2005;Davis,
Love, & Preston, 2012).
Cognitive psychologists mainly use categories (or category sys-
tems) that are entirely artificial. They pursue this approach of
learning novel, artificial categories to experimentally control for
potential variations and differences in subjects’ prior knowledge
(though this approach has long been criticized for its incomplete-
ness within the same literature, e.g., Murphy & Medin, 1985, and
see below). Any given experiment will typically design the struc-
ture of the artificial categories to test the role of component
cognitive mechanisms in the learning process, or to test divergent
predictions of competing models of category learning. In general,
the goal of cognitive psychologists is to reverse engineer acquisi-
tion and use of category knowledge to precisely capture the un-
derlying cognitive capacities, mechanisms, and representations.
In contrast, educational psychologists’ primary goal is not to
reverse engineer, but to understand learning to design improved
instructional techniques. In doing so, researchers have focused on
materials used (or could be used) in real classrooms to teach
complex and educationally relevant topics (e.g., highly abstract,
idealized, and generalizable scientific concepts such as “force” in
physics). Generally, this complexity makes it difficult to charac-
terize moment-to-moment engagement of cognitive mechanisms
as precisely as it has been achieved by cognitive psychologists
This article was published Online First March 7, 2016.
Micah B. Goldwater, School of Psychology, The University of Sydney;
Lennart Schalk, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, ETH Zurich.
Australian Research Council Grant DP150104267 supports the research
of the MBG. Both authors contributed equally to this work. We first would
like to thank editor David Uttal and three anonymous reviewers for their
helpful critiques. We also thank Tyler Davis, Arthur B. Markman, Bruno
Rütsche, Henrik Saalbach, Michael Serra, and Elsbeth Stern for comments
on a draft version of the article, and Jeffrey Loewenstein, Kenneth Kurtz,
and Dedre Gentner for influential discussion of these ideas.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Micah B.
Goldwater, School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Brennan Mac-
Callum (A18), Camperdown NSW, 2006 Australia. E-mail: micah
.goldwater@sydney.edu.au
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Psychological Bulletin © 2016 American Psychological Association
2016, Vol. 142, No. 7, 729–757 0033-2909/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000043
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