Generating explanations via analogical comparison (original) (raw)
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Analogical reasoning in young children
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1987
We conducted two experiments to assess the performance of 4-and 5-year-olds on geometric analogy tasks. Each task consisted of 16 analogy problems that were presented in a manipulative, gamelike context and that used attribute blocks that varied on the dimensions of color, size, and shape. Experiment 1 was a preliminary test of the analogical reasoning abilities of 4-and 5-yearolds. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that many of the preschoolers were capable of applying analogical reasoning in the solution of geometric analogy problems of the form A:B::C:?. We also found that children who did not consistently reason analogically showed evidence of a reasoning strategy that was governed by a hierarchical rule structure. Experiment 2, in which a modified version of the geometric analogy task in Experiment 1 was used, confirmed the findings of the initial experiment with regard to the analogical reasoning ability of 4-and 5-year-olds. The rule structure was verified for nonanalogical reasoners, whereas analogical reasoners generally exhibited no consistent pattern in their response errors. 401 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.
Analogical reasoning in children
Journal of Pragmatics, 1998
This slim book is chock full of original ideas about analogical reasoning in children. It is written very clearly, and the arguments are laid out in a straightforward manner. The book appears in the Erlbaum series Essays in Developmental Psychology, although author is avowedly not a developmentalist. She believes that analogical reasoning does not develop over age, and she sets out to support this thesis. Much of what I write in these pages deals with the nature of the claims and arguments she brings forth to bear on her thesis.
Self-explanation, Feedback and the Development of Analogical Reasoning Skills
Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, 2012
It is generally accepted that providing explanations during a task can facilitate problem solving performance in both adults and children. This paper aims to answer two important questions. First, can current theories of explanation be generalised to children's explanations of self-generated answers? Second, what is the impact of such self-explanation on the development of children's analogical reasoning skills? One-hundred-and-ten six-and seven-year-old children took part in seven sessions of matrix completion trials in one of five conditions: (1) explanation plus feedback; (2) explanation only;
Achieving abstraction: Generating far analogies promotes relational reasoning in children
Developmental Psychology, 2018
Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children's relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from adults indicates that the process of solving far analogies may be a more effective scaffold for transfer of a relational strategy. We explore whether engaging with far analogies similarly induces such a strategy in preschoolers. Children were provided with the opportunity to solve either a near or far spatial analogy using a pair of puzzle boxes that varied in perceptual similarity (Experiment 1), or to participate in a control task (Experiment 2). All groups were then presented with an ambiguous spatial reasoning task featuring both object and relational matches. We were interested in the relationship between near and far conditions and two effects: (a) children's tendency to spontaneously draw an analogy when solving the initial puzzle, and (b) their tendency to privilege relational matches over object matches in a subsequent, ambiguous task. Although children were more likely to spontaneously draw an analogy in the near condition, those who attempted the far analogy were more likely to privilege a relational match on the subsequent task. We argue that the process of solving a far analogy-regardless of a learner's spontaneous success in identifying the relation-contextualizes an otherwise ambiguous learning problem, making it easier for children to access and apply relational hypotheses.
Children’s development of analogical reasoning: Insights from scene analogy problems
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2006
We explored how relational complexity and featural distraction, as varied in scene analogy problems, affect children's analogical reasoning performance. Results with 3-and 4-year-olds, 6-and 7-year-olds, 9-to 11-year-olds, and 13-and 14-year-olds indicate that when children can identify the critical structural relations in a scene analogy problem, development of their ability to reason analogically interacts with both relational complexity and featural distraction. Error patterns suggest that children are more likely to select a distracting object than to make a relational error for problems that present both possibilities. This tendency decreases with age, and older children make fewer errors overall. The results suggest that changes in analogical reasoning with age depend on the interplay among increases in relational knowledge, the capacity to integrate multiple relations, and inhibitory control over featural distraction.
Analogical Reasoning in the Classroom: Insights From Cognitive Science
Mind, Brain, and Education, 2015
Applying knowledge from one context to another is a notoriously difficult problem, both for children and adults, but lies at the heart of educational endeavors. Analogical reasoning is a cognitive underpinning of the ability to notice and draw similarities across contexts. Reasoning by analogy is especially challenging for students, who must transfer in the context-rich and often high-pressure settings of classrooms. In this brief article, we explore how best to facilitate children's analogical reasoning, with the aim of providing practical suggestions for classroom instruction.
Developmental Science, 2010
Theories accounting for the development of analogical reasoning tend to emphasize either the centrality of relational knowledge accretion or changes in information processing capability. Simulations in LISA, (Hummel & Holyoak, 1997, 2003), a neurally-inspired computer model of analogical reasoning, allow us to explore how these factors may collaboratively contribute to the development of analogy in young children. Simulations explain systematic variations in United States. and Hong Kong children's performance on analogies between familiar scenes (Richland, Morrison, & Holyoak, 2006; Richland, Chang, Morrison & Au, 2010). Specifically, changes in inhibition levels in the model's working-memory system explain the developmental progression in U.S. children's ability to handle increases in relational complexity and distraction from object similarity during analogical reasoning. In contrast, changes in how relations are represented in the model best capture cross-cultural differences in performance between children of the same ages (3-4 yrs) in the United States and Hong Kong. We use these results and simulations to argue that the development of analogical reasoning in children may best be conceptualized as a equilibrium between knowledge accretion and the maturation of information processing capability. ! Development of Analogical Reasoning ! 3 A Computational Account of Children's Analogical Reasoning: Balancing Inhibitory Control in Working Memory and Relational Representation ! Analogy provides a framework for comparing the structure of elements within a domain with the structure of elements of other elements in the same or another domain (Gentner, 1983; Gick & Holyoak, 1980). In other words, the elements of a source may be compared and subsequently mapped to a target. An important consequence of this comparison process is the ability to make inferences about the elements of the target domain. Thus analogy is an important way that people can learn about new things based on prior knowledge (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995; Hofstadter, 2001). Children's development of analogical reasoning allows them to notice correspondences and make inferences about relationally similar phenomena across contexts.