This Practice Guide is the third in a series of Institute of Education Sciences (IES) guides in
education. Much of teaching is about helping students master new knowledge and skills and …

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture
points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in …

Recent studies have suggested that educators should avoid concrete instantiations when
the goal is to promote transfer. However, concrete instantiations may benefit transfer in the …

Children's extraordinarily long developmental period and their play and exploratory activities
provide them with a greater opportunity to learn than is found in any other species. We argue …

According to Geary's evolutionary approach, humans are able to easily acquire primary
knowledge and, with more efforts, secondary knowledge. The present study investigates …

In this paper we present the results of a comparative study that explores the potential
benefits of using embodied interaction to help children, aged 7 to 10, learn abstract concepts …

Kaminski, Sloutsky, and Heckler (2008a) published in Science a study on “The advantage of
abstract examples in learning math,” in which they claim that students may benefit more from …

Educators often use concrete objects to help children understand mathematics concepts.
However, findings on the effectiveness of concrete objects are mixed. The present study …

Learning algebra is difficult for many students in part because of an emphasis on the
memorization of abstract rules. Algebraic reasoners across expertise levels often rely on …

Multimedia engineering instruction typically includes verbal descriptions and diagrams,
which can be presented in a contextualized format, using descriptions and illustrations of …