Pictorial support and specific instructions as design variables for children's concept and rule learning

How do young children most readily learn new concepts and rules? The authors contribute a new study to the literature on this important subject. They tested two design strategies on 69 elementary school children to investigate (a) the effect of using three types of pictorial supports to focus student attention on the important features of a concept or rule as described in accompanying written material and (b) the importance of specific pretraining instruction on how to use the pictorial to notice and label relevant rules and concepts. Posttests showed it works better to supply pictures than to have students draw their own, and both these methods work better than having students form mental images of the material studied. All three types of pictorials required about the same student time-on-task. The authors also found that specific pretraining instruction in how to use the pictorials is very important. The learning task involved two arithmetical rules-intersection and empty set.