Big-Picture Learning: Using Abstraction in the Classroom
Abstraction is everywhere. It’s in the machines we use every day. It’s in the way that apps “just work,” while behind the scenes they run on layers of code.
Being able to use abstraction is a valuable skill for programmers. Likewise, abstraction is a computational thinking skill that blends well with tasks such as building algorithms and recognizing patterns. Abstraction helps learners diagram ideas or create visualizations of complex data.
Getting bogged down in details can make complicated tasks more difficult. Even the human brain runs on abstraction, particularly with how memories are “chunked” and filtered. Given how important abstraction is, it’s a valuable skill to incorporate into the classroom.
What Is Abstraction?
Abstraction is the act of looking at the big picture. It’s stepping back from nitpicky details and thinking of things as a singular object. A computational thinking chapter in the open-source textbook K–12 Technology Integration defines abstraction as problem-solving “[…] by reducing unnecessary detail.”
As an example, think of a painting. Paintings are complex. An impressionistic painting, with its emphasis on how paint is applied to the canvas, can be contrasted against the smoothly detailed works of hyperrealist artists. And yet, at a purely visual level, each work is just an array of brush strokes arranged in a specific order.
When brush strokes are abstracted, they can be viewed holistically to make a painting — either a general work of art or a specific piece. That painting can be analyzed beyond the visual aspects. It can be diagrammed, or it can stand in as a prototypical idea of “painting”-ness. So-called “abstract art” often focuses on nonliteral subjects, instead exploring artistic qualities like shape, line and color.
Sloppy brush strokes abstract to a hazy image abstracts to an impressionistic painting abstracts to an artist’s oeuvre. Jumping from brush strokes to the collected works of Monet is challenging. In each instance, a specific quality of the group is generalized into a category, with a focus on key aspects of that grouping.
Abstraction through Concept Mapping and Diagramming
Some things are easy to abstract. For objects that already fit into a subcategory, such as an animal like a lion, an abstraction may be moved to a more general category. A lion can fit into an abstract group like “carnivore” (for its meat-eating qualities) or “cat” (for its feline qualities).
Other ideas can be more challenging to abstract, and it’s these ideas that are especially worth abstraction. In coding, for example, abstraction can be used to bundle objects or processes in order to do something with them — create a function, or a class, or a generalized library to make complex tasks easier to run. In a way, abstraction is a foil to elaboration, focusing on narrow ideas.
When learning abstraction, it can be helpful to use concept mapping. With concept mapping, you’re focusing on broadening the scope of a query, which in turn requires more open categorization. This generalization process seeks to find vital qualities of an object, which in turn creates more open groupings.
With a concept map, you can ask students to take an object or idea — the title of a movie, for example — and branch out into concepts. Star Wars can branch out into “sci-fi,” “space travel” and “hero’s journey.” These ideas can be further generalized through more branches. Sci-fi might include ideas like “spaceships” or “aliens.”
Students can create concept maps through tools such as Canva and MindMup or via pen and paper. These maps can be embedded into notebooks, digital or otherwise. The key is to make sure students are considering qualities of an object or idea, looking at ways to simplify it or categorize it for later reuse.
Creating a diagram is another way of abstracting bits of data into a more accessible form. For example, sentence diagrams use deconstructed sentences to teach abstract grammatical concepts like “noun” and “verb.” This activity from Code.org shows how Mad Libs (called “Mad Glibs” here) are a kind of abstraction — and how useful abstracted diagrams can be.
Practical Applications for Abstraction
So your students can abstract the concept of a “lion” into the category of “cat,” or “predator,” or “vertebrate.” Or they’ve categorized Star Wars as “sci-fi.” Why does this matter?
In programming, clean code features taut writing with limited repetition. In this sense, creating easily recalled code chunks can be seen as abstracting a selection of code into a single idea, allowing for that abstraction to be reused (as with functions) or tweaked (as with variables or classes). Abstracted code can be embedded in complex structures, resulting in multifaceted instructions to the computer.
In the humanities, in classes such as English language arts (ELA), looking at abstracted ideas is a good way to analyze works. For example, looking at a series of books as “genre” can give students a chance to work on pattern recognition, studying the commonalities of books in a specific genre. Digital tools can help with exploring texts through abstraction — for example, this post shows how “distant” versus “close” reading abstracts a text into sentiment, or clusters of words.
Math can be a wonderland of abstraction, as this Scholastic post suggests. Models are abstracted ideas derived from actual numbers, but with abstraction in place, these models and formulas can be used for problem-solving in novel situations. Likewise, with STEM subjects, theories and laws act as big-picture ways of navigating the world.
Abstracting Further…
As abstraction is a concept often explored in computer science, particularly with students learning to use object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, looking up “abstraction” and terms relating to code can provide a different way of looking at abstraction relevant to coding.
Surprisingly, the Wikipedia page on “abstraction” offers food for thought in a variety of disciplines. While not focused on education in particular, passages on how abstraction is used in various fields can nonetheless help spark assignment ideas. For example, the page discusses qualities of abstraction such as referents (how ambiguity both helps and hurts understanding of non-concrete ideas). Ideas can be integrated into lessons regardless of subject.
This guide on early-learning computational thinking from the Getting Smart blog offers a few ideas for incorporating abstraction into lessons. Likewise, looking up “computational thinking classroom abstraction” on Google brings up a variety of pages looking at abstraction through a computational thinking lens.
As a final thought, this column on the ASCD page discusses the idea of “concreteness fading,” or abstracting information for students over time. Through their research, authors posit abstraction as mastery. In that sense, abstraction can be a way of mastering materials, understanding enough about a topic to distill its essence into something elegant — a worthy goal!
About the blogger:
Jesika Brooks
Jesika Brooks is an editor and bookworm with a Master of Library and Information Science degree. She works in the field of higher education as an educational technology librarian, assisting with everything from setting up Learning Management Systems to teaching students how to use edtech tools. A lifelong learner herself, she has always been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology. She edits the Tech-Based Teaching blog (and always wants to hear from new voices!).
