Educating Students for Innovation in STEM: Analogy Is a Key

Innovative thinking in STEM requires conceptualizing phenomena as systems of relations that can be connected, compared, and manipulated to generate novel inferences. Analogy is a key cognitive underpinning of these processes, so teaching children to reason analogically is crucial to quality STEM education. U.S. math teachers use analogies less effectively than in higher achieving countries, but experiments suggest practicable ways gesture and visual representations can improve STEM instruction.