Post-problem reflective tutorial dialogues between human tutors and students are examined to predict when the tutor changed the level of abstraction from the student's preceding turn (i.e., used more general terms or more specific terms); such changes correlate with learning. Prior work examined lexical changes in abstraction. In this work, we…

Analogous thinking has been commonly discussed as being an inherent and distinguishing characteristic of human cognition (e.g., Gentner, 2010; Goldstone, Day, & Son, 2010; Holyoak, in press; Rittle-Johnson & Star, in press). Gentner (2003) has argued that as part of the human cognitive toolbox, comparison accompanied by the relational language to…

The associations among cognitive automatization, abstract problem solving, and educational performance were studied using 127 fourth to ninth grade students. A number of measures of fast, automatic, and fluent performance (FAF measures) were used: writing the alphabet; reading from a word list; and mentally performing arithmetic operations. The…