Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Labeling and elaboration manipulations were used in examples to affect the likelihood of students learning to represent workers' rates and times in algebra word problems dealing with work. Learners studying examples with labels for rates and times were more likely to transfer and correctly modify the representations compared to learners who did not see the labels. An elaborative statement describing the possible representations for the different terms in the work equation did not reliably affect performance. These results extend prior work (Catrambone, 1994, 1995) on subgoal learning by demonstrating that representations, not just sets of steps, can be successfully transferred and modified through a manipulation (labeling) that has been shown to aid subgoal learning.