Max Wertheimer's experiment on insight learning consisted of his telling children to find the area of a parallelogram. In one group, he told them a formula to solve it, but the other group did not receive the formula. The children who were given the formula were able to find the area, but they did not understand why it was the answer. Because not many of the children who were not given the formula knew how to find the area of a parallelogram, they figured out to cut the right triangles off the ends of the parallelogram and combine them to form a rectangle. After this was done, he gave both groups of students a set of transfer problems (problems like the original but different in some way). The children who were not given the formula and understood how to find the area of the parallelogram did better on the transfer problems, while the children who received the formula and did not understand did worse. The students who were not given the formula used insight learning, which allowed them to see how to solve the problem.

• First, do you think you are insightful? What does that mean to you?
• In what ways is insight learning really just good guessing?
• Describe an experience where you didn't really know how to do or solve something, then like magic you managed to figure it out. How would you explain what occurred?
• How would you utilize your understanding of insight learning to teach others in your career?
• How would you study insight learning? What variables would you measure?