Abstraction Introduction

Have you ever had students take a final exam and do poorly simply because they could not eliminate the extraneous information?  When solving problems in math, science, social studies and language arts, many students struggle with deciphering the relevant information to solve that problem.  This struggle is arguably most apparent to us in math word problems.  Students read a paragraph beginning with a train leaving station A, traveling at a certain speed limit toward station B, but have a hard time identifying the relevant information to answer the question.  Though it is most apparent in math, abstraction applies to all the educational subjects.  Being able to find relevant information, extract it, and use it to solve a problem is hard.  This is why we want to teach abstraction.  Like pattern finding, abstraction is another step toward automation.

There are two main purposes of abstraction: Generalization and Seeing structure.