Study suggests abstract better than concrete in math ed

Study suggests math teachers scrap balls and slices

New York Times  April 25, 2008

A study by researchers at Ohio State University suggests that teaching math in the abstract may be more beneficial than using "real-world" examples.  The research, conducted on college students, showed that those who learned an unfamiliar mathematical system in the abstract could better apply their learning in a new situation than those who learned the system using concrete examples.  In explaining the results, the researchers hypothesize that learning math with concrete examples keeps the learning superficial and the resulting knowledge is not deep enough to be transferred to other situations.