AIDING SUBGOAL LEARNING - EFFECTS ON TRANSFER

Students often memorize a set of steps from examples in domains such as probability and physics, without learning what subgoals those steps achieve. A result of this sort of learning can be that these students fail to solve novel problems that do not permit exactly the same set of steps even though the old goal structure is maintained. Three experiments demonstrated that both labeling and visually isolating a set of steps in examples independently help students learn a subgoal and be more likely to solve novel problems that involve that subgoal but require different steps to achieve it.