Can “less” create “more” in analogical reasoning?

Abstract

Successful analogical reasoning requires an analogue in a source domain to have high degrees of structural and surface similarity with a learning task in a target domain. It also requires learners to have sufficient source- and target-domain knowledge. We review the literature and speculate that “less” might create “more”; in some situations, analogies that have fewer degrees of similarity may be more effective for learning. In this exploratory study, we engaged eight school leaders in dyads to develop a bottom-up perspective on innovation diffusion through analogical reasoning. The qualitative data in the study appear to echo our speculation. The dyads that have less prior target-domain knowledge face challenges with regard to innovation diffusion when they learn with analogues that have more degrees of similarity – both structural and surface. They, however, are able to learn with analogues that have fewer degrees of similarity. Learning was shown to take place when the dyads reflected on an analogue first, before they compared the analogue and innovation diffusion to make any analogical inferences. Although constrained by the exploratory nature of the study, the findings provide preliminary evidence that “less” is possible to create “more” in analogical reasoning under certain conditions, implying an interesting direction for experimental examination in future.

Keywords:

• analogical reasoning
• degrees of similarity
• prior knowledge
• desirable difficulties
• instruction

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof Michael Jacobson at the University of Sydney, Australia, for his constructive feedback and Ms Rajwant Kaur at the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, for her editing help. We also appreciate the reading group at the Learning Sciences Lab for the critique and suggestions.

ORCID

Jun Song Huang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2960-7960

Notes

1. The Case One dyad did not receive the quit smoking, virus infection and evangelizing analogues. Reasons are provided in the “Design of the Sequence” segment of this paper.