Differential-associative processing: A new strategy for learning highly-similar concepts

摘要

For many students concepts like fluid and crystallized intelligence are difficult to learn because they have highly-similar definitions that are easy to confuse. The challenge of learning these highly-similar, yet often confused concepts is further complicated by the fact that students are tested on exams about differences between the concepts. In this theoretically-motivated research we test a new strategy for learning highly-similar pairs of concepts, called differential-associative processing. The results revealed that performance on multiple-choice questions was higher when students learned highly-similar concepts using differential-associative processing rather than a strategy of their own choice, text-based elaboration, or identifying similarities and differences. The results also revealed that students spontaneously transferred differential-associative processing to a neutral control condition. Taken as a whole, the present study supports differential-associative processing as a useful strategy for learning similar concepts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.