Proceedings of the 34th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology in Mathematics Education : mathematics in different settings vol:2 pages:297-304
Conference of the International Group for the Psychology in Mathematics Education edition:34 location:Belo Horizonte, Brazil date:18-23 July 2010
Recently, Kaminski, Sloutsky, and Heckler (2008a) published a study entitled “The advantage of abstract examples in learning math” in Science, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. In a “math wars” climate, this publication called forth both enthusiastic and critical comments by mathematicians, math educators and policy makers. But, as far as we know, no attempts have been undertaken yet to test some of these (critical) comments empirically. We report a study that involves a partial replication but also an important extension of this study. Our quantitative results confirm the findings of Kaminski et al., but our qualitative data raise questions about their interpretation of what students actually learnt of the abstract examples.