Can seeing the forest impact transfer?
Effects of construal level on learning strategies and knowledge transfer

Instruction facilitating the abstraction and transfer processes necessary for deep conceptual understanding is notoriously difficult. Individual differences in learning strategies are one possible explanation for variation in transfer outcomes. Some prior work has shown that rule-abstraction learning strategies facilitate knowledge transfer better than memorization strategies for particular tasks. However, it’s not clear what factors lead to the adoption of such strategies during learning. The current work investigated the effect of construal mindset on memorization vs. rule-abstraction strategies and subsequent transfer. An abstract construal is theorized to focus on abstract/global information and a concrete construal on concrete/contextualized information. Experimental manipulations of construal mindset may provide a means to prime individuals to attend to either high-level or low-level features, which may impact their learning strategy and subsequent learning and performance. The goal of the current work was to examine how inducing a more abstract or concrete mindset before learning would impact strategies and subsequent transfer of learning. A secondary goal was to further test the relations between strategies, learning, and transfer. We hypothesized that construal mindset would impact participants’ learning strategy which would in turn impact learning and transfer. Across three studies, we implemented an activity aimed at manipulating construal mindset in order to influence whether individuals’ focused on memorization/exemplars or rule-abstraction strategies during a category-learning task. We measured what strategies participants adopted during the category learning task and tested whether they transferred the knowledge acquired from this task to transfer tasks. While results across our three studies provided evidence that our manipulation of construal level did impact participants’ attention to high-level vs. low-level features, it did not impact their reported strategies, nor their transfer accuracy outcomes. We didn’t find evidence for the first link between construal and strategy (in fact, we found evidence against it in this context), however we did find consistent evidence for the second link between strategy, learning, and transfer. Specifically we found that endorsement of a rule-abstraction strategy was related to increased accuracy during learning and increased performance on classification and inference transfer tasks. Implications of this work for theories of construal, learning, and transfer will be discussed.