Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to notice relational patterns across situations is crucial to learning. An important question is how people build transferable and generalizable knowledge by learning from examples. The study investigated the conditions that make comparison and explanation beneficial to learning by comparing learning outcomes of engaging in explanation or comparison in a categorization task and examining how varying degrees of instructional support affect these two processes. The results showed an advantage of comparison over explanation; however, this was specific to combination of relational labels and definitions and prompts to compare. These results add to existing research and extend our understanding of how best to support college students learning relatively difficult material. The findings also inform ways educators can support learning by developing instructional designs that support learning through analogical reasoning.