The Effects of Idealized and Grounded Materials on Learning, Transfer, and Interest: An Organizing Framework for Categorizing External Knowledge Representations

Research in both cognitive and educational psychology has explored the effect of different types of external knowledge representations (e.g., manipulatives, graphical/pictorial representations, texts) on a variety of important outcome measures. We place this large and multifaceted research literature into an organizing framework, classifying three categories of external knowledge representations along a dimension of groundedness: (1) idealized, (2) grounded and including only relevant features, and (3) grounded and including irrelevant features. This organizing framework allows us to focus on the implications of these characteristics of external knowledge representations on three important educational outcomes: learning and immediate performance using the target knowledge, the degree to which that knowledge can transfer flexibly, and the interest engendered by the learning materials. We illustrate the framework by mapping a wide body of research from educational and cognitive psychology onto its dimensions. This framework can aid educators by clearly stating what the research literature says about these characteristics of external knowledge representations and how they activate and support the construction of internal knowledge representations. In particular, it will speak to how to best structure instruction using external knowledge representations with different characteristics, depending on the learning objective. Researchers will benefit from the analysis of the current state of knowledge and by the description of what open questions still remain.