Transitions in learning: evidence for simultaneously activated strategies.
Children in transition with respect to a concept, when asked to explain that concept, often convey one strategy in speech and a different one in gesture. Are both strategies activated when that child solves problems instantiating the concept? While solving a math task, discordant children (who produced different strategies in gesture and speech on a pretest) and concordant children (who produced a single strategy) were given a word recall task. All of the children solved the math task incorrectly. However, if discordant children are activating two strategies to arrive at these incorrect solutions, they should expend more effort on this task than concordant children, and consequently have less capacity left over for word-recall and perform less well on it. This prediction was confirmed, suggesting that the transitional state is characterized by dual representations, both of which are activated when attempting to explain or solve a problem.
Goldin-Meadow
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University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, Illinois 60637.
Nusbaum
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H
Garber
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P
Church
R B
RB
D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D011340:Problem Solving; D013850:Thinking; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning