Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important component of problem solving is the ability to make use of previous examples.This requires noticing the relevance between the current and previous problems. W e examine the role of the superficial and structural relations among problems and the remindings that these similarities elicit in a problem solving situation. Students learned to program in an electronic book environment in which they were able to store and later retrieve solved problems. Their use of jM-evious solutions suggests that novices are indeed sensitive to structural similarities and can use retrieved solutions in new problem situations.