Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A proposal is made for representing the knowledge learners acquire from examples in terms of subgoals and methods. Furthermore, it is suggested that test problems can also be represented in terms of the subgoals and methods needed to solve them. Manipulations of examples can influence the particular subgoals and methods learned. Thus, transfer can be predicted by the overlap in the learned subgoals and methods and those required to solve a novel problem. A subgoal is an unknown entity, numerical or conceptual, that needs to be found in order to achieve a higher-level goal of a problem. A method is a series of steps for achieving a particular subgoal. The experiment presented here suggests that elaborations in example solutions that emphasize subgoals may be an efficient way of helping a learner to recognize and achieve those subgoals in a novel problem, that is, to improve transfer. It is argued that conceptualizing problem-solving knowledge in terms of subgoals and methods is a psychologically plausible approach for predicting transfer and has implications for teaching and design of examples.