Commentary: The Cognitive Costs of Context: The Effects of Concreteness and Immersiveness in Instructional Examples

摘要

In their paper, Day et al. (2015) present a pair of studies exploring whether the concreteness of learned material and the context in which learning is embedded can influence retention. This builds on prior work assessing the influence of concrete examples during learning (Goldstone and Sakamoto, 2003). That work found that while concrete examples can facilitate immediate learning (Bransford and Johnson, 1972), it impedes the ability to transfer that knowledge to new situations, as is found in work on problem solving (Gick and Holyoak, 1983). This commentary highlights and extends three issues touched on and implicated by Day et al.'s paper, but which were not the central focus of that work. These are, namely, the importance of ecological validity, the transfer of learning to new domains, and the exploration of very long-term memories.