Teaching By Analogy: From Theory To Practice

Analogy is a powerful tool for fostering conceptual understanding and transfer in STEM and other fields. Well-constructed analogical comparisons focus attention on the causal-relational structure of STEM concepts, and provide a powerful capability to draw inferences based on a well-understood source domain that can be applied to a novel target domain. However, analogy must be applied with consideration to students' prior knowledge and cognitive resources. We briefly review theoretical and empirical support for incorporating analogy into education, and recommend five general principles to guide its application so as to maximize the potential benefits. For analogies to be effective, instructors should use well-understood source analogs and explain correspondences fully; use visuospatial and verbal supports to emphasize shared structure among analogs; discuss the alignment between semantic and formal representations; reduce extraneous cognitive load imposed by analogical comparison; and encourage generation of inferences when students have some proficiency with the material. These principles can be applied flexibly to topics in a wide variety of domains.