Learning Spurious Correlations instead of Deeper Relations

Effective instructional design requires navigating the tradeoff between providing helpful cues to the correct solutions and supplying hints that ultimately detract from what students learn. The present study manipulated the correlations between superficial features and the correct solutions in a set of training problems in the domain of exploratory data analysis and examined their effect on novices with no prior knowledge of statistics. Students who were trained on problems with these spurious correlations performed more poorly on posttest problems lacking these associations, making errors in the direction predicted by the misleading features. The theoretical and educational implications of the outcomes of this practice are discussed.