Internalizing and the Use Specificity of Device Knowledge

Instruction and Practice in Learning to use a Device

“…It predicts that instructionally derived declarative knowledge will remain relatively unaffected by practice on tasks, and it predicts that procedural knowledge will become tuned for specific tasks, limiting its transferability to new tasks (the so-called "use specificity" effect; Anderson, 1987). Bibby and Payne (1993) reported a series of experiments testing the adequacy of the knowledge compilation model in the context of learning to use a simple device. A priori, one might expect the enduring effect of instructionally derived declarative knowledge about a device to be compromosed by interaction with that device, as we know that users of a device will themselves spontaneously generate accounts of the way it works (Payne, 1991;Shrager & Klahr, 1986).…”

“…We conducted an experiment based on Bibby and Payne's (1993) Experiment 3. In this experiment, participants learn and practise three separate tasks on a simple device, having first learned about the device from one of two types of instructional material.…”

“…Bibby and Payne, 1993, dubbed this the internalisation hypothesis.). Task A is easier than Task B with Instruction 1, but Task B is easier than Task A with Instruction 2, when instructions are being read, and when instructions have been remembered.…”

“…Even if we are satisfied with this "explaining away" of one aspect of the Bibby and Payne (1993) data, clearly more work needs to be done before we can claim a full understanding of the role of instructions in the acquisition of device-use skills. We have exploited the general ideas in the ACT* theory, but we have not produced an explicit account of participants' mental representations, or of the dynamics of strategy shifts.…”

Tele-Immersive Collaboration in the CAVE Research Network

“…Recent work in providing multiple representations to enhance learning have implied that this is a non-trivial problem [Bibby and Payne, 1993;Larkin and Simon, 1987]. It has been shown that students perform better in tests when they learn a concept given more than one representation than students given only a single representation do [Salzman et al, 1998].…”