Face to Face Interaction• Contrasting Cases and Articulating Early Forms of Knowledge

At the early stages of learning, it is often difficult for novices to express their understanding. One way to help novices communicate early understanding to teachers and other experts is to use contrasting cases. Contrasting cases juxtapose instances that are “near misses” of one another. For example, in the figure, novices need to learn to identify a breed of dog. An expert can help them learn, but when it comes time to identify a new instance of the same breed from a set of possibilities, the novices need to work alone. In one condition, the learner and expert worked with single exemplars of the target breed. In another condition, the learner and expert worked with the exemplar plus a set of contrasting cases. The results showed that the novices learned more from the expert when the contrasts were available. This occurred, because the novices could use the contrasts to ask questions and take more control of their learning. For example, if an expert said, “notice the curve of its nose,” the novice in the contrasting cases condition could say, “is the curve different from this other dog?”