Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although mental schemata are central to many contemporary learning theories, theprecise relationship between such schemata and specific types of learning remains vague.This paper describes an analysis of subjects learning basic computer skills when presentedwith four different kinds of elaborations that should influence subjects' schemata: (I) asimple description with no model: (2) a redundant elaborated text also with no explicitmodel: (3) a functional model: (4) a descriptive analogy. Subjects were tested onprocedures, general comman d concepts, and system questions. Models and analogies wereshown to improve initial performance on all types of questions. However only systemquestions showed this advantage after a delay. It is argued that the utility of building amental model through elaboration depends on the specific tasks that are analyzed.