| Spontaneous transfer is of great interest to researchers and educators alike. The ability to recognize how existing knowledge can be applied to new problems is an incredibly valuable skill not only for invention, scientific discovery and intellectual development but also for everyday life. It is a key goal of formal education to develop knowledge that can easily be used in this manner but education outcomes show that standard practices often fail to promote this type of thinking. This thesis presents four experiments designed to test category construction, a promising learning technique for promoting spontaneous transfer. The experiments test the effectiveness of this technique as compared to favored alternatives for promoting transfer in addition to investigating several implementation variables that could help to strengthen the task. Results show that category construction can indeed be an effective method for learning new principles, recognizing when a new situation fits these principles and applying existing knowledge to these novel situations to solve problems. |
