A preliminary discussion on the use of analogy in educational consultation

摘要

In man-to-man teaching, skills needed for a tutor are to propose a guideline through understanding student's mental states. In this study, we set up a situation of educational consultation in a psychological laboratory and analyze the process of the consultation by the protocol analysis method. First, we regarded the consultation process as a process of solving an ill-defined problem and described quantitatively the process. Second, we hypothesized that analogical inference was an important factor that influenced the process of solving an ill-defined problem and analyzed individual cases in which analogy was actually used. For analysis, we made subject's instruction proposal as a result of consultation correspond to the problem solving process and types of analogy used in the process respectively. As the result, we confirmed that characteristics of each subject's proposal could be well explained based on a problem space focused on and types of base used in analogy by each subject.