Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is hypothesized that when a set of steps in an example solution are labeled, the label can serve as a cue to the learner to group those steps and to attempt to determine their purpose. The resulting subgoal that represents the steps' purpose can aid transfer to novel problems that involve the same subgoal but require new or modified steps to achieve it. The present experiment tested the label-asgrouping-cue hypothesis by examining transfer performance by learners with different math backgrounds who studied examples that used either no labels or labels that varied in meaningfulness. Learners with a stronger math background transferred equally well regardless of the meaningfulness of the label, and better than learners not receiving labels in their examples, while learners with weaker math backgrounds transferred successfully only when they studied examples using meaningful labels. This result is consistent with the claim that the presence of a label, rather that only its semantic content, can be sufficient to induce subgoal learning if the learner has sufficient background knowledge.