Improving Concept Learning in Education via Category Construction.

A central goal of education is to provide students with knowledge they: (a) can successfully apply within the domain of learning and (b) can transfer, as appropriate, to new and different domains. Yet, much research has shown that learners frequently fail to access and use applicable stored knowledge when the circumstances at retrieval differ from those at encoding. Recent laboratory studies have revealed that encoding instances of a concept as members of a relational category considerably attenuates such failures of access. In the present work, we evaluate the efficacy of one such technique (category construction) applied in conjunction with direct instruction in the authentic educational setting of middle-school classrooms. Across two experiments, category construction is evaluated relative to a standard classroom practice of a worksheet with comprehension questions in order to assess how well each promotes mastery and transfer of a target concept. In addition, potential supports to improve learning outcomes are assessed: practice with category construction (Experiment 1) and partial precompletion of the category construction task (Experiment 2). Overall, we find favorable evidence that category construction leads to greater sensitivity to the underlying conceptual structure of targeted concepts and delivers transfer advantages over a worksheet control. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: A key goal of education is not only to support mastery of complex content but also to enable students to access and apply what has been learned to new settings and domains. Results from multiple inclass experiments show that supporting initial learning through category construction can enhance performance relative to a control group on assessments of mastery and transfer. This work highlights a lightweight classroom activity that could be implemented broadly to enhance educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]