Using analogies to improve elementary school students' inferential reasoning about scientific concepts

School Science and Mathematics, Mar 2001 by Yanowitz, Karen L

To examine whether learning with analogies would aid elementary school children's inferential reasoning about unfamiliar domains, fourth- and sixth-grade students were presented with several short expository paragraphs describing different scientific topics. Some students received texts containing instructional analogies, while others received nonanalogical texts.

Method

Participants. Thirty-one fourth graders (mean age =9.8 years, range 9.3 to 11.1 years), and 22 sixth graders (mean age 12.0, range = 11.5 to 13.3 years) participated in this study. One fourth-grade student did not provide any recall information. Two schools (from the same school district) in a primarily Caucasian, middle-low income population agreed to participate in this study. Parental permission slips were sent home with all students in each grade level, and approximately 50% of the students returned permission slips with parental consent. Teachers then indicated on the returned slips students who read at or above grade-level, and only those students participated in the study (students who read below grade level participated in a different study). Teachers made this assessment based on their professional experience with their students.

Materials and design. Four different short paragraphs were developed for Experiment 1. All of the paragraphs were adapted from prior research using instructional analogies; infections (adapted from Vosniadou & Schommer, 1988), enzymes (adapted from Bean, Searles, & Cowan; 1990) ants and aphids (adapted from Zook & DiVesta, 1991), and mitochondria (adapted from Glynn & Takahashi, 1998). The analogical texts were initially pilot tested with 7 fourthgrade students who read the texts aloud, indicated any words they did not understand, explained their understanding ofthe source domain, and answered the factual and inference questions. The texts and questions were modified based on the responses of these participants. Five elementary school teachers then informally read the revised paragraphs. The teachers made further suggestions to improve the texts, but overall judged the concepts described in the texts understandable by third-- and fourth-grade students.

Each paragraph was written in an analogical and nonanalogical format. The first sentence in the analogical text explicitly compared the source and target concepts and the rest of the text elaborated the way in which the concepts were similar. For example, one paragraph stated, "Mitochondria are like a power plant. You can use all the parts of your body because the mitochondria sends them energy, just like you can use everything in your house because the power plant sends them energy." The nonanalogical texts presented only information about the science concept. Mitochondria were described as "Mitochondria send energy to your body. You can use all the parts of your body because the mitochondria sends them energy." In order to make the paragraphs equal in length so that participants spent approximately the same amount of time processing both versions, additional details and repetition of information were included in the nonanalogical texts. For example, the mitochondria text included facts such as "Mitochondria are really extremely small" and "The energy from the mitochondria is present in your body when you are a baby."