The present study investigates the effects that concreteness fading has
on learning and transfer across three grade levels (4–6) in elementary
school science education in comparison to learning with constantly
concrete representations. 127 9- to 12-years-old elementary school
students studied electric circuits in a computer-based simulation
environment, where circuits remained concrete (bulbs) throughout the
learning or faded from concrete to abstract (bulbs to resistors). The
most important finding was that the outcomes seemed to be influenced by a
developmental factor: the study found a significant interaction between
condition and grade level in relation to learning outcomes, suggesting
that the outcomes generally improved as a function of grade level, but
that there were notable differences between the conditions regarding the
improvement of outcomes across the three grades. According the results,
learning with constantly concrete representations either took less time
or resulted in better learning compared to concreteness fading. Because
transfer is one of the central arguments for concreteness fading, a
somewhat surprising finding was that the concrete condition succeeded at
least as well as the fading condition on transfer tasks. The study also
discusses why the results and issues related to the conceptualisation
and operationalisation of central concepts in the study call for caution
towards generalization and for more research with young learners across
different grades.