ICLS Symposium | iY-14_STEM-EDUCATION | Investigating, Understanding, and Generating Concreteness in STEM Education

What role concreteness plays in education is a key question, especially in STEM where topics can be considered rather abstract. In this symposium, we wish to highlight several issues and opportunities related to concreteness. First, we offer a critical perspective on the value of concrete representations and the learners who use them. Second, we detail a data-driven taxonomy that aims at fully describing concreteness and abstraction, allowing for a fine-grained understanding of these topics. Third, we illustrate how these lines of research can support practice by presenting an automatic approach to the generation of concrete representations. Finally, we open the conversation to other domains of STEM by attempting to connect discourse in mathematics education to other disciplines. We believe that by aggregating empirical evidence, theoretical contributions, and practical implications, this symposium offers a complete overview of the questions around concreteness in STEM education and supports interdisciplinary and impactful conversations at ISLS.