Interventions to Enhance the Initial Encoding of Source Analogs

Abstract

A wealth of empirical studies have demonstrated that analogous situations are seldom retrieved from memory unless they share similar elements with the target situation being processed. These competence limitations lie at the core of the problem of inert knowledge, that is, students’ difficulties for applying their knowledge to contents and in contexts different from those of the original learning. The present chapter begins by reviewing instructional interventions aimed at facilitating subsequent retrieval of learning contents by means of disembedding their structural features from irrelevant, domain-specific information. While a first generation of studies suggested that explicit comparisons between two analogous situations were crucial for eliciting more abstract representations during initial learning, later studies pointed to alternative means of inducing this kind of transfer-appropriate representations. Next, we review psychological explanations for the beneficial effect of abstracting source analogs, and describe how this finding could be accommodated within extant computational models of similarity-based retrieval. We conclude by discussing the possibilities and limitations of the source-encoding approach for being applied to educational settings.