Investigating the generation-first-instruction-later method for its effects on learning and transfer: A proposal to study analogical reasoning as the generation task

Abstract

Productive Failure1,2 studies have shown that working on generative and complex activities prepares students for learning from subsequent instruction (i.e., delayed instruction). Under a delayed instruction setting, this study investigated the degree of freedom of generation and the level of task complexity as two key attributes of a preparatory task. The purpose was to make preliminary exploration on whether there is a boundary at which the benefit of a more generative task over a less generative task, such as compare and contrast, may disappear when the task complexity reduces.