Some psychological and educational limitations of learning by discovery

Abstract

devoid of all particularity, and can combine this idea with concepts of form, size, color, number, function, etc., to formulate relational propositions that could hitherto be formulated with only the greatest difficulty. That verbal concepts of this nature are more transferable and more manipulable than subverbal insights, is demonstrated by numerous experiments on the effects of verbalization on children's ability to solve transposition problems. Knowledge of underlying verbal principles also enhances the learning of relevant motor performance; and the availability of distinctive verbal responses facilitates rather than inhibits concept formation and conceptual transfer. Not all ideas, however, are acquired quite as easily as the concept of house. As he enters school the child encounters other concepts of much greater abstractness and complexity, e.g., concepts of addition, multiplication, government, society, force, velocity, digestion, that transcend his immediate experience and language ability. Before he can hope to acquire a meaningful grasp of such abstractions directly, that is, through direct verbal exposition, he must first acquire a minimal level of sophistication in the particular subject-matter area, as well as graduate into the next higher level of intellectual development г.е., the stage of formal logical operations. In the meantime he is limited to an intuitive, subverbal kind of understanding of these concepts; and even though convincing empirical evidence is still lacking, it is reasonable to suppose that preliminary acquisition and utilization of this subverbal level of insight both facilitates learning and transferability, and promotes the eventual emergence of full verbal understanding. (Gertrude Hendrix, of course, would say that full understanding was already attained in the subverbal phase, and that verbalization m rely attaches words to sub-verbal insight.) Now, assuming for the moment that He drix' experimental findings are valid, how can we explain the fact that immediate verbalization of newly acquired subverbal insight renders that insight less transferable than when verbalization is not attempted [5]? First, it seems likely that verbalization of nonverbal insight, before such insight is adequately consolidated by extensive use, may interfere with consolidation at this level, as well as encourage rote memorization of the ineptly stated verbal proposition. Even more important, however, is the likelihood that a verbally expressed idea when ambiguous, unprecise, ineptly formulated, and only marginally competent possesses less functional utility and transferability than the ordinarily more primitive and less transferable subverbal insight. This is particularly true in the case of children, because of their limited linguistic facility and their relative incompetence in formal propositional logic. Drawing these various strands of argument together, what can we legitimately conclude at this point? First, verbalization does more than just encode subverbal insight into words. It is part of the very process of thought which makes possible a qualitatively higher level of understanding with greatly enhanced transfer power.

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