Can Seeing the Forest Impact Transfer? Effects of Construal Level on Learning Strategies and Knowledge Transfer

• In Event: Contextualizing Knowledge and Decision Making in Strategic Learning

Abstract

Purpose: Instruction facilitating the abstraction and transfer processes necessary for deep conceptual understanding is notoriously difficult (Day & Goldstone, 2012). Individual differences in learning strategies are one possible explanation for variation in transfer outcomes. Strategies employed during learning and resulting knowledge representations directly impact the likelihood of transfer. The current work investigates the effect of construal level on memorization vs. rule-abstraction strategies and subsequent transfer. An abstract construal level is theorized to focus on abstract/global information and a concrete construal on concrete/contextualized information. Thus, manipulating construal level should influence memorization/exemplars versus rule-abstraction strategies during learning and subsequent transfer.

Framework: Prior research on individual differences in learning strategies has shown some tend to focus on memorizing exemplars during learning while others focus on abstracting the underlying concept/rule (Little & McDaniel, 2015). Such differences have been shown to impact later transfer, with those using rule-abstraction performing significantly better on transfer tasks and receiving higher STEM class grades than those using a memorization strategy (McDaniel et al., 2018).

A separate strand of research in social psychology has shown that individuals can be primed to have a more abstract or concrete mindset (Fujita & Trope, 2014). Construal-level theory suggests that people can construe/interpret an object/event at different levels of abstraction resulting in a more high-level (distant, abstract) or low-level (close, concrete) mental representation (Trope & Liberman, 2010). For example, taking an exam could be construed as “demonstrating what I’ve learned” (abstract) versus “completing a multiple-choice problem” (concrete). These differences may impact how students approach the exam, suggesting important implications for education. Construal level has been manipulated using various tasks (e.g., considering how to do an activity vs. why do an activity) and has demonstrated effects on various decision-making and motivation outcomes. However, few construal level studies have examined outcomes pertaining to learning strategies and transfer.

Method: An online study was conducted in which undergraduate students were randomly assigned to a concrete mindset manipulation, abstract mindset manipulation, or no manipulation before completing a category-learning task. The task trained participants on a learning objective before having them transfer this training to two transfer problems: ambiguous and unambiguous. Unambiguous items are new to participants but don’t differentiate between a memorization or an abstract rule strategy (i.e., both would produce similar answers). Ambiguous items do differentiate between the two strategies. Participants also completed a questionnaire about their learning strategies.

Results: Preliminary results showed that those in the abstract mindset group more strongly endorsed a rule-abstraction strategy than those in the concrete group. Across participants, endorsement of a rule-abstraction strategy significantly predicted ambiguous transfer performance. Follow-up experiments are planned to further investigate these hypotheses and relations.

Significance: Knowledge that is deep, structural, and can transfer to new contexts is what most educators hope to impart to their students. The current work attempts to establish that framing the learning context at a higher level of construal can facilitate the acquisition of such knowledge. This has theoretical implications for theories of construal level, learning strategies, and transfer.

Authors

• Kelly Boden, University of Pittsburgh

• Timothy James Nokes-Malach, University of Pittsburgh

• David B. Miele, Boston College

• Kentaro Fujita, The Ohio State University