Disagreements about concreteness and abstraction in mathematics education may be verbal disputes rooted in word meaning¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitativer3·q1
Currency · newest study 2025 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q1 i? Applying Chalmers' concept of broadly verbal disputes, apparent disagreements about concreteness and abstraction can arise wholly from disagreement about what the terms mean, and can be resolved by clarifying usage. → Julia Chatain 2025
Evidence¶
Julia Chatain 2025¶
Julia Chatain, Charlotte Müller, Keny Chatain, Leon Calabrese, Manu Kapur. (2025). Concreteness and Abstraction in Mathematics Education: A Taxonomy of the Semantic Landscape. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-025-10073-9
q1 · i? · qualitative · r3
Theoretical argument applying philosophy of language: the article quotes Chalmers' definition of a broadly verbal dispute and illustrates it with statements such as math being difficult to learn because it is abstract, where parties meaning generalizable versus unfamiliar would disagree. The argument is analytical, not empirical.
"A dispute over S is (broadly) verbal when, for some expression T in S,t h e parties disagree about the meaning of T , and the dispute over S arises wholly in virtue of this disagreement regarding T ."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Mathematics education literature uses the terms concrete and abstract with multiple distinct meanings — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
- Participants held an unresolved epistemological dissensus over whether frequency-based encoding can represent qualitative meaning, ranging from skepticism to enthusiasm — related
- 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 — related
- Concreteness fading enables learners to build a store of memorable images usable when abstract symbols lose meaning — related
- Concreteness fading helps learners interpret ambiguous or opaque abstract symbols in terms of well-understood concrete objects — related
- Language difficulties, rather than inherent inability to grasp numerical concepts, may often underlie struggles in mathematics — related
- Students apply precision-of-language as a distinct evaluation criterion, flagging hedging phrases as open to interpretation and proposing concrete substitutions — related
- A single representation can be abstract along one dimension and concrete along another, and concrete for one learner but abstract for another — related
- Concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles across multiple educational domains — related
- Concreteness fading may not be as broadly generalizable across mathematics and natural science domains as has been suggested — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
verbal-disputes-concreteness-abstraction |
title |
Disagreements about concreteness and abstraction in mathematics education may be verbal disputes rooted in word meaning |
description |
Disagreements about concreteness and abstraction in mathematics education may be verbal disputes rooted in word meaning |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2025 |
source_checked |
2026-10-20 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-20 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — julia-chatain-2025 |
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