Instructional Analogies and Conceptual Misrepresentations

Target-domain inferences generated by 3rd-grade students' ( N = 193) learning from an analogy were analyzed. Learners' awareness (explicit or implicit) of constraining principles for 3 relational systems (mappable base, conflicting base, and target) was manipulated in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design with an appended control. Children who learned by analogy generated more incorrect inferences on the basis of irrelevant relations and surface features than those who were unaware of the analogy. Children generated fewer incorrect inferences on the basis of conflicting base relations when both the target system and the conflicting base system were explicitly constrained. These results suggest the importance of pragmatic factors in analogical learning and demonstrate that young learners construct misrepresentations of a target domain by selecting irrelevant information for analogical mapping.