Effect of type of pretraining and variety of instances on children's concept learning

Abstract

The effect of instructional set on pretraining performance and subsequent learning of the mathematical concepts of set-union and set-intersection was studied in children approximately ten-years-old. Verbal pretraining was found to facilitate learning during pretraining, compared with aesthetic pretraining. However, in the subsequent concept learning task, for which the same materials were employed, the Ss who had aesthetic pretraining acquired the concepts more readily than those who had rote-learning instructions during pretraining. This difference due to pretraining was only statistically reliable among relatively low socio-economic status (SES) Ss in the condition that received a small variety of instances of the concept. The variety of instances presented during the concept learning task did not significantly affect concept acquisition per se, but generalization to new instances was significantly greater when the concept had been learned originally from a small rather than a large variety of instances.