An exploratory study on the components and process of learner-generated visual analogy

Abstract

The ability to reason by analogy is an important feature of human cognition and creativity, which is pervasively used in both everyday life and expert thinking. In education, analogies are used to introduce a new concept by associating it with what learners already know. Previous research on instructional analogies has shown their positive effects on learning, and has hence proposed instructional models that incorporate them in teaching, such as Teaching With Analogies Model by Glynn (1989) and the General Model of Analogy Teaching by Zeitoun (1984). While valuable, this type of research only posits limited insight on how learners generate analogies and how they perceive the use of a visual analogy. Thus, the depth of insight into instructional strategies for effective and engaging activities is also limited. The purpose of this study was to understand how learners generate visual analogies and perceive the use of visual analogies in learning by using think-aloud protocol analysis, visual task analysis, interview and survey. Four learners participated in this study to generate their own visual analogies about chemical bonding while thinking aloud. The collected protocol and visualization data were analyzed using the coding scheme developed from literature review. The results showed that the learners were engaged in six stages: planning, understanding concept, searching for visual analogy, elaborating on visual analogy, matching, and monitoring. They spent the majority of time to understand the presented concept and to elaborate on their visual analogies. In understanding concept, the learners reread the excerpt, identified critical attributes, and compared attributes. In elaborating on visual analogy, they described and modified visual analogies. Nevertheless, the learners were hardly engaged in evaluating the limitations of their final visual analogy. In terms of visualization, the learners consistently used the following five types of visualization: simple, selective, appendant, conceptual and strategic visualizing. Moreover, the learners perceived the use of visual analogy as helpful for understanding the learning content and also enjoyable. Yet they found it challenging to come up with their own analogy. Based on the findings, the following implications can be drawn. First, the process of generating visual analogy is not necessarily supported by visual cues. In this study, the learners tended to use verbs as cues to come up with analogies, which implies providing various verbal and visual cues for learners to facilitate the generation process when using learner-generated visual analogies. Second, the learners minimal engagement in evaluating their visual analogies may explain the possible misconception caused by analogies, which thus suggests the need for providing feedback. Third, the use of learner-generated visual analogy is used as a tool for understanding abstract concept not only by associating it with a familiar concept, but also by selectively attending to the critical attributes of the concept learnt. Finally, the task of generating a visual analogy encourages visualization of both the analogy itself as well as the learning content, which can support learning.