Cognition of relational discovery: why it matters for effective far transfer and effective education?

Abstract

In his essay “The Aims of Education,” Alfred North Whitehead ([55]) famously cautioned against “inert ideas.” He argued that an idea that was simply memorized and not used-in the sense of relating it to other ideas or novel situations as they arise-was potentially worse than learning no idea at all. The assumption at the core of this assertion is that understanding requires a continual process of assessing, comparing, relating, and extrapolating, and any “knowledge” that discourages this process is effectively harmful to the cognitive development of the individual and to their education specifically. The aim of education was, thus, to nurture this understanding and not to impart a series of seemingly disconnected facts that serve little purpose beyond their immediate sphere of relevance. Nearly a century later, Whitehead's argument still resonates. Researchers in education, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience are still in search of a complete understanding of the processes that allow us to mentally represent abstract concepts such that they can be discovered, compared, and applied to new domains. Relational discovery-the process of coming to understand how entities interact-is a key aspect of this process because our understanding of a complex system necessarily involves learning the relations among its components. Hence, there is immense value in recognizing similarities in how things fit together that cannot be gained from simply memorizing the specific instances in which we encounter them. As Goldwater and Schalk ([24]) have highlighted, research on relational category learning in cognitive psychology is strongly aligned with these broad educational goals. A relational category is defined in terms of the relations among its component entities rather than the precise characteristics of those entities. A relational category is one whose members share a common relational structure but not necessarily common features (Gentner and Kurtz, [15]). For instance, a catalyst does not classify molecules by any particular set of internal properties but by their role in facilitating chemical reactions.