Abstract
The present study investigates the effects that concreteness fading has on learning and transfer across three grade levels (4–6) in elementary school science education in comparison to learning with constantly concrete representations. 127 9- to 12-years-old elementary school students studied electric circuits in a computer-based simulation environment, where circuits remained concrete (bulbs) throughout the learning or faded from concrete to abstract (bulbs to resistors). The most important finding was that the outcomes seemed to be influenced by a developmental factor: the study found a significant interaction between condition and grade level in relation to learning outcomes, suggesting that the outcomes generally improved as a function of grade level, but that there were notable differences between the conditions regarding the improvement of outcomes across the three grades. According the results, learning with constantly concrete representations either took less time or resulted in better learning compared to concreteness fading. Because transfer is one of the central arguments for concreteness fading, a somewhat surprising finding was that the concrete condition succeeded at least as well as the fading condition on transfer tasks. The study also discusses why the results and issues related to the conceptualisation and operationalisation of central concepts in the study call for caution towards generalization and for more research with young learners across different grades.
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Notes
The choice for resistors as abstract representations is not evident from a formal physics point of view, whereof a resistor and a bulb are equivalent and equally concrete circuit components. The physics view, however, presupposes notable formal knowledge about the domain. Given the fact that the students had no previous formal education on electricity it is highly unlikely that they already shared such conception. This contention is backed up by results of several studies that show that students, even on a high school level, perceive bulbs and resistors differently (Jaakkola and Veermans 2015; Johnson et al. 2013; Moreno et al. 2011). An explanations for this difference, and an argument for the assertion that bulbs are more concrete than resistors, is that from a conceptual or perceptual point of view, bulbs have a clear practical purpose (to radiate light) that based on prior everyday experiences practically everyone can relate to. In contrast, the purpose of resistors to reduce current flow and divide voltages in a circuit, among many other uses, is unclear and significantly more abstract to most people.
The initial sample consisted of 134 students but only those were included in the analyses who completed all three parts of the study (pre-test, intervention, and post-test).
The students worked in pairs because working in pairs is a natural procedure in science classrooms in Finland, which at the same time ensured better comparability with the initial study that also included pairs (Jaakkola and Veermans 2015).
g is Hedges' (1981) bias corrected standardised mean difference effect size for two independent samples.
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This work was supported by research grant (no 266189) from the Academy of Finland to the first author.
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Appendix
Appendix
A translated and compacted example of a worksheet in the concrete condition (CC)
A translated and compacted example of a worksheet in the fading condition (FC)
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Jaakkola, T., Veermans, K. Exploring the effects of concreteness fading across grades in elementary school science education. Instr Sci 46, 185–207 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-017-9428-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-017-9428-y