Pre-college Electrical Engineering Instruction: The Impact of Abstract vs. Contextualized Representation and Practice on Learning, Martin Reisslein, Roxanna Moreno and Gamze Ozogul, Journal of Engineering Education July 2010 Vol 99 No 3
This paper sets Year 9 students an the problem of calculating electrical resistences in parallell. A third get a standard circuit diagram (the abstract version), some got a picture with a battery and two light bulbs (the contextualised version) and some got both. In the same exercise some got two problems to solve and some got four problems. Using analysis of variance they then calculate whether the real life version helps learning and whether doing more problems improves learning.
The students with the contextual problem did better than those with the abstract picture, the authors point out another study that found the opposite (Moreno, Reisslein and Ozogul, 2009b). Thos doing 4 problems didn't seem to be better than those doing 2 problems. Presumably its an either you understand it or you dont type of problem.
The experiment design and analysis is probably of more interest than the results since it has components of an instruction piece, several problems and then measurement of the learning,
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