The Role of the Abstracting Schema for Subsequent Transfer Performance

The considerable corpus of research finds systematic failures in ability of people to apply their knowledge in new situations, or, in other words, to transfer performance. This evidence was obtained experimentally on material of studying and solution of two task analogs (a source and target). An abstracting schema of source can be transferred to the solution of a structural similar task. The schema can be presented in the form of various visual representations (VR). The quality of VR reflects understanding of the structure of tasks. We have not found experimental studies that investigated the relationship quality of VR with the transfer. Our purpose was to study the role of VR of the subsequent transfer performance. The additional research objective was to describe the problems connected with understanding of structure of a task, and also to offer recommendations for the organization of the training focused on deep understanding and transfer. In experiment subjects (N=156) first read one story describing problem and their solution, then to produce the principle of its solution and illustrate this principle in the form of the schema, after attempting to solve an analogous task. As a result of experiment, we have found that quality of VR had significant effect on subsequent transfer performance. Besides for most of participants the difficulty causes represented structures of a task. Keywords: analogical transfer, visual representation, abstracting schema, deep structure