The Transfer of Scientific Principles Using Concrete and Idealized Simulations

By Robert L. Goldstone, Ji Yeon Son. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2005

527 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Participants in 2 experiments interacted with computer simulations designed to foster understanding of scientific principles governing complex adaptive systems. The quality of participants' transportable understanding was measured by the amount of transfer between 2 simulations governed by the same principle. The perceptual concreteness of the elements within the first simulation was manipulated. The elements either remained concrete throughout the simulation, remained idealized, or switched midway into the simulation from concrete to idealized or vice versa. Transfer was better when the appearance of the elements switched, consistent with theories predicting more general schemas when the schemas are multiply instantiated. The best transfer was observed when originally concrete elements became idealized. These results are interpreted in terms of tradeoffs between grounded, concrete construals of simulations and more abstract, transportable construals. Progressive idealization ("concreteness fading") allows originally grounded and interpretable principles to become less tied to specific contexts and hence more transferable.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, History and Philosophy of Science, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe086a055e7e1c65396862d3a5cee60892d8a6db

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Citations in the corpus

Concreteness Fading in Mathematics and Science Instruction: a Systematic Review (2014, background): “First, it helps learners interpret ambiguous abstract representations in terms of wellunderstood concrete objects (Goldstone and Son 2005; Son et al. 2012).”
Understanding Cognitive Load in Digital and Online Learning: a New Perspective on Extraneous Cognitive Load (2021, background): “…of realism despite an increase in extraneous load could potentially be due to a low level of disfluency that triggers more effortful processing, other explanations that assume a higher interest being generated through realistic visualizations could also be true (e.g., Goldstone & Son, 2005).”
Who Benefits from Diagrams and Illustrations in Math Problems? Ability and Attitudes Matter (2018, background): “The contextualization perspective holds that contextualizing or ‘grounding’ math problems in real-world scenarios supports successful problem solving (Belenky & Schalk, 2014; Goldstone & Son, 2005; Koedinger & Nathan, 2004).”
Representational disfluency in algebra: evidence from student gestures and speech (2009, background): “Concrete exemplars of a concept also convey superficial information that may distract learners from the underlying mathematical structure, helping with initial learning, but limiting its subsequent transfer (Kaminski, Sloutsky & Heckler, 2008) unless concreteness was reduced over time in favor of gr”
Practicing versus inventing with contrasting cases: The effects of telling first on learning and transfer. (2011, background): “When learning science, students often focus on the surface features of single instances rather than the deep structures that define a phenomenon across instances (e.g., Goldstone & Son, 2005).”
When Am I Ever Going to Use This in the Real World? Cognitive Flexibility and Urban Adolescents’ Negotiation of the Value of Mathematics (2017, background): “However, an explicit application based in students’ experiences can actually ease cognitive load by ‘grounding’ abstract concepts (Goldstone & Son, 2005; Koedinger & Nathan, 2004).”
The Role of Situational Interest in Personalized Learning (2018, background): “Incorporating a student’s out-of-school interests into a mathematics problem is thought to activate the student’s prior knowledge by grounding the problem in a context that is familiar (Goldstone & Son, 2005).”
Authoritative, Accountable Positioning and Connected, General Knowing: Progressive Themes in Understanding Transfer (2006, background): “A recent study by Goldstone and Son (2005) explored this issue.”
A Comparative Analysis of the Distributive Property in U.S. and Chinese Elementary Mathematics Textbooks (2010, background): “Understanding fundamental principles like the DP is critical for any domain ( Goldstone & Son, 2005 ).”
Motivating Children to Learn Effectively: Exploring the Value of Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games (2011, background): “Some (although by no means all) existing research suggests that children (in particular) can find it difficult to transfer their understanding from concrete representations to alternative representations (e.g. DeLoache 1991; Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler 2009; Goldstone & Son, 2005).”