2015
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01876
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The Cognitive Costs of Context: The Effects of Concreteness and Immersiveness in Instructional Examples

Abstract: Prior research has established that while the use of concrete, familiar examples can provide many important benefits for learning, it is also associated with some serious disadvantages, particularly in learners’ ability to recognize and transfer their knowledge to new analogous situations. However, it is not immediately clear whether this pattern would hold in real world educational contexts, in which the role of such examples in student engagement and ease of processing might be of enough importance to oversh… Show more

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Cited by 23 publications
(24 citation statements)
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References 53 publications
(54 reference statements)
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“…Moreover, in contrast to many classroom studies, online distribution of the tutorial allowed considerable control over the intervention and precise recording of the students’ behavior for inclusion in subsequent analyses. We believe that similar in vivo yet individually-controlled studies of learning in educational contexts [ 41 , 55 ] represent a major potential growth area for cognitive science.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Moreover, in contrast to many classroom studies, online distribution of the tutorial allowed considerable control over the intervention and precise recording of the students’ behavior for inclusion in subsequent analyses. We believe that similar in vivo yet individually-controlled studies of learning in educational contexts [ 41 , 55 ] represent a major potential growth area for cognitive science.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As discussed above, it is unlikely that knowledge can be truly decontextualized, but the effect can be similar with academic contextualization if the knowledge is situated entirely in a school setting. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if the curriculum is too embedded in a particular context, the learner may overly contextualize the subject knowledge to a point where he is unable to transfer the knowledge to other contexts (Day, Motz, & Goldstone, 2015). As illustrated in Figure 1, the learner may intuitively recognize that his car accelerates when coasting down a hill and he may have a sense that an accident would result in greater damage at higher speed, but he would not be able to recognize these variables as existing in a transferable relationship, and he would be unlikely to represent that relationship as F = ma when the knowledge is overcontextualized.…”
Section: Contextualization As a Spectrum Of Processes And Outcomesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Thus, intuition suggests that student should learn and remember more when information is presented in a concrete form. Furthermore, Day et al ( 2015 ) make a case for why placing students in a more realistic and natural environment could lead to a positive influence of concreteness. And, yet, intuitive expectations were not fulfilled.…”
Section: Ecological Validitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In their paper, Day et al ( 2015 ) present a pair of studies exploring whether the concreteness of learned material and the context in which learning is embedded can influence retention. This builds on prior work assessing the influence of concrete examples during learning (Goldstone and Sakamoto, 2003 ).…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%