Some Learners Abstract, Others Memorize Examples: Implications for Education

In educational contexts, students may engage in various strategies to acquire to-be-learned information. For example, when learning how to solve math problems, students may focus on superficial attributes of the problems and memorize procedures for solving them, or they may abstract underlying rules or regularities to understand why certain procedures are appropriate. These different strategies have implications for what students learn. In the present paper, we suggest that laboratory research investigating individual differences in exemplar-based versus rule-based representations (and the strategies that afford these representations, which we postulate to be memorization and rule-abstraction, respectively) might have implications for student learning. We also develop the notion that one's strategy might persist across tasks in different domains and then discuss the extent to which laboratory tasks might predict outcomes in educational contexts. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research and the applicability of current research to educational practice.