The effect of analogy instruction on young children's metaphor comprehension

Analogies and metaphors are creative and powerful tools for assimilating new information and fitting it into one's existing knowledge base. This study explored the role of analogy in enhancing the ability of young gifted children to paraphrase metaphors. It was hypothesized that gifted children's ability to interpret metaphoric language would be improved by analogy instruction. A modeling procedure was used to highlight the parallelism constraint of analogy solution, namely the requirement that one rule governs the relationship between terms in both pairs of a four term analogy. A puppet model solved picture analogies and used parallel explanations for its answers. Children who were instructed in analogies solved more analogies correctly and offered more parallel explanations than those who did not have analogy instruction. Also, they correctly interpreted more metaphors in a second phase of the study. Enhancing children's ability to understand and learn from analogies and metaphors has useful and varied classroom applications, particularly for gifted students.