Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Often failures of problem solving on educational assessments are failures of problem categorization. That is, whenreasoners do not properly classify a novel problem they do not know what solution to apply. For example, often physics studentsdo not recognize the underlying commonalities in the relationships among the variables in different problems concerningNewton’s laws of motion (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981). Addressing this challenge there have been separate lines of researchexamining 1. how differences in students’ learning strategies or cognitive abilities affects their propensity to discover relationalcommonalities (e.g., Little & MacDaniel, 2015) and 2. how variations in task structure change the likelihood of successfulcategorization (e.g., Roher & Pashler, 2010). However, relatively little research has examined whether the optimal task structuredepends on the learner’s strategy or ability. Across several experiments, we demonstrate multiple dependencies between theeffectiveness of different task structures on differences in learning strategy.