The Sources of Children's Reasoning Errors During Analogical Problem Solving

✍ Scribed by BARRY GHOLSON; DEREECE SMITHER; AUDREY BUHRMAN; MELISSA K. DUNCAN; KAREN A. PIERCE

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 882 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199611)10:7<85::aid-acp440>3.0.co;2-k

✦ Synopsis

The patterns of errors exhibited by elementary-school children in isomorphic and nonisomorphic transfer were examined. In the first study, which involved scheduling problems such as missionaries-cannibals, the children transferred to two consecutive nonisomorphic analogues followed by one that was isomorphic to the acquisition problem. In each of three acquisition conditions, which differed only in terms of their similarity to the nonisomorphic transfer analogues, the children exhibited patterns of performance in all three transfer tasks that were predicted by case-based reasoning theory. In a second study children were required to carry out a specific sequence of mathematical operations in a rudimentary algebra problem, and then transferred to nonisomorphic problems. Consistent with structuremapping theory, children provided with explicit information concerning the problem structure during acquisition transferred relational features, and avoided errors. Children who simply carried out the sequence of mathematical operations during acquisition relied on specific features of the acquistion task and exhibited predicted patterns of errors in transfer.