Reception Learning of Concepts: Learners' Interpretations of Instructions and Generalization of Knowledge

The purpose of the present study was to consider a new way of explaining "example effects", that is, the effect in which examples used when teaching concepts influence the generalization of that conceptual knowledge. University undergraduates (N = 93) were explicitly taught a rule of seed plants, using the example of tulips. They then were asked to answer several questions about their interpretations of the instructions, and given a classification task in order to test generalization of the acquired knowledge. It was found that about 50% of students could not derive any general information about the rule from the. instructions. They tended to make the concept classification error of undergeneralization. The results suggest that "example effects" can be explained by example-based induction.