AUTHOR=Day Samuel B. , Motz Benjamin A. , Goldstone Robert L. TITLE=The Cognitive Costs of Context: The Effects of Concreteness and Immersiveness in Instructional Examples JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=6 YEAR=2015 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01876 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01876 ISSN=1664-1078 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 overshadow any potential negative impact. We conducted two experiments in which curriculum-relevant material was presented in natural classroom environments, first with college undergraduates and then with middle-school students. All students in each study received the same relevant content, but the degree of contextualization in these materials was varied between students. In both studies, we found that greater contextualization was associated with poorer transfer performance. We interpret these results as reflecting a greater degree of embeddedness for the knowledge acquired from richer, more concrete materials, such that the underlying principles are represented in a less abstract and generalizable form.