Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When introducing a novel mathematical idea, should wepresent learners with abstract or concrete examples of thisidea? Considerable efforts have been made over the last decadeto settle this question in favor of either abstract or concreterepresentations. We contribute to this discussion through acritical replication and extension of a well-known study in thisarea. Whereas the target article argues for the generalsuperiority of abstract representations, we demonstrate thatseemingly minor modifications of the study design indicateotherwise. Our results suggest that the previously reported“advantage of abstract examples” manifested not becauseabstract examples are advantageous in general, but because theearlier studies utilized concrete examples that arepedagogically suboptimal.