Acquisition of Understanding and Skill in Relation to Subjects' Preparation and Meaningfulness of Instruction.

摘要

Four experiments examined effects of college student subjects' aptitudes, preinstructional experience, method of instruction, and differences among posttest items. Instruction that emphasized meanings of concepts led to better performance on posttest items requiring understanding, but subjects with emphasis on computation were better on simple problems. Subjects with higher measured aptitudes directly relevant to instruction or given relevant preinstructional experience had more success in meaningful instruction than did subjects with lower aptitude scores, but little or no aptitude difference was found for instruction emphasizing algorithms. Finally, two kinds of operations were distinguished-identifying relevant information in the problem situation and carrying out computations. The former appears more closely related to conceptual understanding, the latter to computational skill. (Author)