How do teachers learn about what learners already know? How do learners aid teachers by providing them with information about their background knowledge and what they find confusing? We formalize this collaborative reasoning process using a hierarchical Bayesian model of pedagogy. We then evaluate this model in two online behavioral experiments (N…

A hallmark of effective teaching is that it grants learners not just a collection of facts about the world, but also a toolkit of abstractions that can be applied to solve new problems. How do humans teach abstractions from examples? Here, we applied Bayesian models of pedagogy to a necklace-building task where teachers create necklaces to teach a…

When teaching a novel mathematical concept, should we present learners with abstract or concrete examples? In this experiment, we conduct a critical replication and extension of a well-known study that argued for the general advantage of abstract examples (Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008a). We demonstrate that theoretically motivated yet…

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem…