Concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles across multiple educational domains¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r? · q2
Currency · newest study 1991 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? The research reviewed demonstrates that concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles in educational domains including knowledge representation and comprehension, learning and memory of school material, effective instruction, individual differences, achievement motivation and test anxiety, and motor skill learning. → Clark 1991

Evidence¶

Clark 1991¶

Clark, J. M., & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual coding theory and education. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149–210. doi:10.1007/bf01320076

q2 · i? · review · r?

The article's synthesis of research on dual coding theory in education reports that "concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles" across the enumerated educational domains, from knowledge representation to motor skill learning. No effect sizes are printed in the available text.

"The research demonstrates that concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles in various educational domains: the representation and comprehension of knowledge, learning and memory of school material, effective instruction, individual differences, achievement motivation and test anxiety, and the learning of motor skills."

Studies bearing on this claim¶

Does having learners form mental images of the material (imagery for text, the keyword mnemonic) improve learning, for whom, and how does it compare with other study techniques? This table gathers the studies behind this claim and the 5 narrower claims that bear on it: 7 distinct studies (5 review, 1 quant-synthesis, 1 causal), q2–q3, 2 of 7 with an effect size coded. One row per study, codes as each entry records them; no effect is averaged and no verdict is drawn. Built by scripts/synthesize_claim.py from eval/synthesis/; a row that looks wrong is fixed on the claim it comes from.

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Adding relevant pictures or graphics to text improves learning from it, with a small pooled effect on reading comprehension, though whether dual coding explains the benefit is disputed — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Multimedia Principle Improves Learning — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• A systematic review argues that concrete materials aid mathematics and science learning when they are explicitly and gradually connected to the abstract symbols they represent — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Concept mapping improves learning over most comparison conditions by a moderate average amount, but not over time-matched retrieval practice — related
• Mnemonic Instruction Improves Recall For Students With Disabilities — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Basic DCT mechanisms can be used to model diverse educational phenomena — possibly the same claim (merge candidate)
• Mathematics education literature uses the terms concrete and abstract with multiple distinct meanings — related
• Attention plays a major role in L2 learning because a task-relevant knowledge base is built in memory through attention — related
• A review chapter (Karpicke 2017) reports, second-hand, experiments in which retrieval practice produced more learning than concept mapping (Karpicke & Blunt 2011) and than imagery strategies such as the keyword mnemonic (Karpicke & Smith 2012) — related
• Summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text, and rereading receive low utility assessments — related
• Disagreements about concreteness and abstraction in mathematics education may be verbal disputes rooted in word meaning — related