Increasing the Transfer of Source Solutions in Analogical Problem Solving

Aim: The aim of the present study is to examine whether spontaneous analogical transfer might be increased by enhancing the relationship between the source problem and solution and/or the gist-level knowledge of the source and target problems.

Study Design: All three experiments use a between-subjects design.

Place and Duration of Study: The University of Texas at San Antonio, Department of Psychology, 2004-2009.

Methodology: Five hundred and twelve fluent English speaking students from the Introductory Psychology classes from the University of Texas at San Antonio participated in this research for course credit. As in typical administrations of analogical problem solving tasks, students encoded a source problem and solution and then read and generated solutions for a target problem. However, one unique feature of our study was the inclusion of a manipulation that specifically enhanced the strength of the relationship between the source problem and solution. Experiment 1A used why questions to strengthen this relationship and Experiments 1B and 2 used multiple-choice questions.

Results: The results of the first two experiments revealed increases in both the complexity and frequency of solutions for the target problems when all three enhancements were present, min χ2 (4) = 13.78, P = .009. Further, the results of the third experiment showed that all three enhancements were necessary for spontaneous transfer to be equivalent to a non-spontaneous hint condition, χ2 (8) = 17.73, P = .03.

Conclusion: Taken as a whole the present findings emphasize the importance of enhancing the relationship between the source problem and solution as well as gist-level knowledge of the source and target problems in the context of analogical problem solving and Kintsch’s (1988) construction-integration framework for comprehension.