The Influence of Personality and Task Conditions on Learning and Transfer

Abstract

To test hypotheses about the optimal place of rules in school learning tasks 124 12-year-old children from a single campus were categorised by ability, sex and two personality traits --extraversion/introversion and general anxiety. The learning task was a program on vectors from which rules were 'abstracted and given either before or after sections of the program containing practice examples.Further evidence for the superiority of rules following practice was obtained. Significant interactions of treatments and extraversion on post-and transfer-tests showed, however, that this occurred because the "rules before" was significantly poorer than the "rules after" condition for extraverts of both above and below average ability. There was no significant difference between the treatments for introverts. Anxiety level differences were not significant, but anxious children were slightly better than non-anxious.

Interactive Relationships Between Measured Personality and Teaching Strategy Variables

“…It wau considered that the teaching provided by the structured strategy might favour results on a test of recall while the unstructured strategy might favour the learning of problem-solving, although these hypotheses were considered tentative as earlier evidence was conflicting. k i t h and Trown (1970) found no interaction between strategy and learning outcome while Worthen (1 968), also working in mathematics, found that unstructured teaching favoured retention and transfer while structured teaching favoured recall. In contrast Rowel1 et al (1969) suggested that structured teaching favoured recall, retention and transfer.…”

“…k i t h and Bossett (1967) compared organised arrangement +underlying principle given + answer given (structured) with random arrangement (Unstructured). Leith and Trown (1970) compared rules before practice (structured) with rules after practice (unstructured). Two experiments carried out by the present author demonstrate some of the problems raised by differences between the variables of related experiments.…”