Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined learning and transfer of a simplemathematical concept when learning a symbolic sententialformat versus learning a diagrammatic format. Undergraduatecollege students learned an instantiation of a cyclic group andwere then given a test of a novel isomorphic group of thesame order followed by a test of a novel non-isomorphicgroup of a higher order. The results were that both thesentential and the diagrammatic formats led to successfullearning and transfer to the novel isomorphic group.However, only learning from the diagrammatic representationproduced successful transfer to the non-isomorphic group.These findings suggest that learning a diagrammaticrepresentation of a mathematical concept can have transferadvantages over learning strictly sentential formats.