Self-Explanation Influences Over The Far-Transfer And The Near-Transfer Of Mathematics Problems

There were two experiments in this research. We were to explore whether self-explanation affect the analogical transfer. Participants were tenth-graders in a high school. They were assigned to one of four groups: the self-explanation and instruction group, the self-explanation and self-learning group, the no-self-explanation and instruction group, the no self-explanation and self-learning group. We asked them to learn the concept and the formula of general term of arithmetic progression under a teacher instruction or self-learning. After learning, they were asked to finish a test of far-transfer problems and near-transfer problems. The results showed that there were not differences in far-transfer and near-transfer score of arithmetic progression problems between two models of self-explanation, and between two models of learning. There was not two factors interaction significantly. By further analyzing whether subjects transferred the concept schema to far-transfer problems, more results showed that: (1) learning models had a significant main effect, but the main effect of self-explanation was not significant. These suggested that the instruction model was more conducive to student's far-transfer of the concept of arithmetic progression schema than the self-learning model, and the effect of the induced self-explanation was not much more different from spontaneous self-explanation. In the second experiment, we chose the tenth graders in a high school as subjects. They were assigned to one of two groups: the self-explanation and the no self-explanation. They were to learn the instantaneous velocity problem, the concept of derivative and its application. After learning, they were asked to finish a test of far-transfer and near-transfer of derivative problems. The statistics results showed that the near-transfer score of derivative problems in the self-explanation group were significantly higher than that in the no self-explanation group, but there was not significant difference between groups.