Abstract and concrete animation representations do not differ significantly in middle school students' electricity achievement under any of the five text-representation conditions¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2020 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on a source with no registered publication record (a web page, book or unpublished report). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Five independent t-tests found no significant abstract-versus-concrete differences for written, signaled written, spoken, written+spoken, or signaled written+spoken text conditions. → Kutbay 2020

Evidence¶

Kutbay 2020¶

Kutbay, E. & Akpınar, Y. (2020). Investigating modality, redundancy and signaling principles with abstract and concrete representation. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (IJEMST), 8(2), 131-145. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1255527

q2 · i? · causal · r2

Five independent-sample t-tests in the quasi-experiment compared abstract with concrete animation under each text condition; none was significant (e.g., written text "t (152) = .45, p = .650"). Equivalence was not formally tested.

"there is not a significant difference between abstract or concrete representation of animations with (a) written text (t (152) = .45, p = .650), (b) signaled written text ( t (170) = 1.06, p = .288), (c) spoken text (t (167) = .13, p = .894)"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Manipulatives Improve Math Learning — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• In one middle-school quasi-experiment on electricity, spoken-text groups outperform written-text groups with both abstract and concrete animation (d = .35) — related
• In one middle-school quasi-experiment, adding written text to spoken narration makes no significant difference to achievement with either abstract or concrete animation — related
• Spoken text modality does not significantly differ from signaled written text modality, or from signaled written plus spoken text, for either abstract or concrete animation — related
• The signaling effect holds only for abstract animation representations: signaling significantly improved achievement over written text with abstract animation but not with concrete animation — related
• All ten multimedia treatment conditions produced significant pre-to-post achievement gains with medium or high effect sizes — related
• Multimedia treatment, prior science level, and unit pre-test level each independently influence electricity achievement, with no significant two-way or three-way interactions — related
• Identical representational designs produced wide individual variation in what felt helpful versus overwhelming (representational fit) — related
• Verbal redundancy does not facilitate learning when materials include images or animation — related
• The abstract advantage stems from the use of multiple representations rather than concreteness itself: single concrete and abstract conditions did not differ, and both outperformed multiple concrete representations — related