Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The causal-contrast approach is a new teaching method thatrecruits learners’ implicit causal discovery process to improvemath learning by juxtaposing contrasting information criticalto discovering the goal of each solution step. Students oftenblindly memorize mathematical procedures and havedifficulty transferring their knowledge to novel problems. Byenabling learners to infer the goal of each step, the causal-contrast approach substantially improved high-school algebraproblem solving compared to a traditional instructionalcontrol (Walker, Cheng & Stigler, 2014). The present studydeveloped Walker et al.’s instructional materials into acomputer-based teaching program and tested the newapproach on community-college students, a population forwhom the traditional approach is often ineffective. The studyadded two new conditions: a baseline that received noinstruction and a condition using a teaching video from KhanAcademy, a well-regarded online educational websiterepresentative of the traditional approach. A delayed post-testindicated that the causal-contrast condition produceddramatically greater success in solving transfer problems thanthe other three conditions.