Felicity Conditions for Cognitive Skill Acquisition: Tutorial Instruction does not need them. Revision

Theoretical work suggests that when students learn a complex skill, they may face ambiguities in how to interpret the training material, and that there may be social conventions, called felicity conditions, about how the teacher will provide information that help the students resolve these ambiguities. One proposed felicity condition is for the teacher to guarantee that a separate lesson will be used for the introduction of new methods or concepts that are disjunctively related to the previously taught material. This hypothesized felicity condition, called one-disjunct-per-lesson, is tested in two experiments. Fourth-grade students were taught multidigit multiplication in two conditions, one that obeyed the felicity condition and one that violated it. It was expected that the training condition that violated the felicity condition would cause greater confusion, but this did not occur. Surprisingly, students in that condition did better than students in the one-disjunct-per-lesson condition on a transfer task. Some revisions to the felicity condition view are suggested in order explain this unexpected result. sdw