Developmental Processes in Learning from Instruction.

Summary In recent years learning is increasingly being studied as an active cognitive process, rather than as a product of situational factors acting upon people. If learning is an active process of constructing meaning, then the effects of situational factors should depend upon the cognitive developmental processes of the learner. In three experiments with a total of 482 individually run fourth and fifth grade children, it was hypothesized and found that cognitive developmental processes predicted the effects of instruction upon learning and transfer. With one exception, instruction that reinforced a dominant component classification strategy enhanced initial learning but produced negative transfer to new classifications, while instruction that reinforced a nondominant component strategy reduced initial learning but enhanced transfer to problems involving both the developed and the trained strategies.