Cognitive Psychology and Mathematical Problem Solving: A Discussion of Mayer's Paper 1

It is always a pleasure to read Mayer’s writings. His experiments invariably involve some clever aspect, and his interpretations and extrapolations are creative. The paper at hand meets those standards. In reacting, I shall roughly follow his outline—encoding a problem, schema training, strategy training, and component skills—after an obligatory opening section on what a problem really is.