Student Generated Analogies in Science: Analogy as Categorization

Abstract: Past research on analogies has tended to focus on analogies generated by a textbook, teacher, or researcher that are then interpreted by a student. Such research identifies how students learn from analogies—but not how students create or use their own analogies. Models of analogy comprehension that have been derived from this research, in particular structure-mapping, cannot be extended to analogy creation. However, features of student-generated analogies show striking similarities to features of categorization, including prototypes, family-resemblance, and a folk-theory basis. In this paper, I present a thread of analogies from a 5th grade science classroom and argue for a view of analogies as a categorization phenomenon