Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What factors affect whether learners adopt a new problem-solving strategy? Potential factors include learners’evaluations of alternative strategies and the degree of similaritybetween their existing strategy and the alternatives. A first stepin answering this question is investigating how people evaluatestrategies. This exploratory study investigated how peopleevaluate strategies for solving algebraic word problems, andhow these evaluations vary as function of individualdifferences. Undergraduates rated three strategies on sixdimensions and judged each pair of strategies for similarity.Factor analysis showed that evaluations could be reduced totwo constructs: efficiency and intuitiveness. We calculatedfactor scores for each participant for each strategy. Efficiencydid not predict similarity ratings on its own, but it did interactwith Need for Cognition. These results suggest stable learnercharacteristics and moment-to-moment evaluations ofstrategies influence judgments about strategy similarity.