Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many students fail to develop adequate understanding of mathematical equivalence in early grades, which impacts lateralgebra learning. Work from McNeil and colleagues proposes that this failure is partly due to the format of traditionalinstruction and practice with highly similar problems, which encourages students to develop ineffective mental models ofproblem types (McNeil, 2014, McNeil & Alibali, 2005). In the current study, we explore students learning trajectoriesin two matched equivalence interventions. We show that, relative to an active control, the principle-based treatmentintervention gives rise to a greater number of successful learners, a designation that, in turn, leads to improved performanceon distal transfer assessments. We further demonstrate a predictive relationship between students engagement with theintervention, via workbook completion, and likelihood of becoming a successful learner. Our findings have implicationsfor early detection of learning and subsequent scaffolding for low-performing students.