Transfer, abstraction, and context

Abstract

In this article, I respond to the recent work of Kaminski, Sloutsky, and Heckler (2008a). I advance two major concerns about their research and its applicability to learning mathematics: a confounding variable that arises from the mathematical differences between the generic examples and concrete examples poses a threat to the construct validity of the experiments, and the overgeneralization of the success of the treatment, given that the measure of success is a prompted near-transfer task.