my name is dr carolina cooper tetzel i'm a senior lecturer in psychology at the university of glasgow in scotland and a member of the learning scientist team and we use science to figure out the best way for students to learn we come up with flexible guiding principles basically rules of thumb to help you study well without spending too much time and one of the learning principles that we have found that helps students learn remember and apply information is called concrete examples concrete examples can be very powerful when trying to understand more abstract ideas and concepts abstract ideas can be difficult to grasp and examples describe those abstract ideas in more concrete ways putting them into concepts you are more familiar with let me give you an example on how to use concrete examples in your learning let's say the teacher is trying to explain to you what an algorithm is they could start with a definition and say an algorithm is a set of rules or steps that leads to the solution of a problem or task this may already help you understand the concept of algorithm a bit better but what usually does the trick is giving some concrete examples of algorithms that you are more familiar with for example when baking a cake the recipe of that cake with the step-by-step description of how to make the cake is an algorithm if you follow the steps you will end up with a delicious cake in the end another example for an algorithm is troubleshooting a photocopier the display walks you through different steps to solve the problem and finally the last example is about finding a specific item in the grocery store you could use the algorithm of looking for it in every single aisle moving from one aisle to the next aisle if the grocery store stocks the item you are looking for this algorithm of searching aisle by isle will be successful so even though these three examples are all quite different from each other they all are based on the same idea of using an algorithm and so should help you understand the concept better your teacher will use examples quite often to explain more abstract ideas so make sure to take note of the examples used and reflect what these examples have in common in order to understand the abstract idea better try to make an effort to identify what connects different concrete examples with each other that aim to explain the same abstract idea this will help you to get a better understanding of the more abstract concept important it is really really vital to have several concrete examples available to explain the same abstract idea and not just one single example only multiple concrete examples will help you to draw connections between them that leads to a better understanding of the abstract idea you can come up with your own examples and find your own examples of abstract ideas and discuss what you have found with your peers they may have come up with an example that you have not thought about before and as a consequence it allows you to deepen your understanding of the abstract concept whenever you find own examples or come up with own examples make sure to get feedback from your teacher whether your concrete examples work well to explain the abstract ideas use that feedback when looking for more examples in the future to wrap up pay attention to the concrete examples that your teacher provides you with think about what these examples have in common in order to obtain a better understanding of the abstract concept they are trying to explain share your own example with other peers and the teachers and check whether your examples are tapping onto the abstract concepts you are trying to understand good luck