Concrete to Abstract, Don’t Reverse That: Concreteness Fading Improves Learning Transfer over Reverse Fading in Visual Data Interpretation

The concept of “correlation is not causation” is routinely taught in science classes. Nevertheless, students struggle to apply it to novel situations. We created learning modules to teach students this concept using concrete and abstract examples. Our results suggest that presenting concrete examples first (concreteness-fading) improves transfer of the topic.