Hidden Frameworks: What Summaries of Goldilocks Reveal About the Process of Abstraction

• In Event: Unplugged CT as Essential Learning Practices: Examples from Elementary Contexts

Abstract

Elementary teachers have often struggled with the computational thinking (CT) concept of abstraction (Dong et al., 2019; Hung et al., 2024), which is considered the most complex and difficult (Ezeamuzie et al., 2022; Qian & Choi, 2023) among the four foundational CT concepts known as the PRADA concepts (Dong et al., 2019): pattern recognition, algorithms, decomposition, and abstraction. This paper describes efforts by researchers and teachers in a K-5 unplugged CT research-practice partnership to integrate abstraction in the teaching of the summary task as part of a broader research project focused on integrating unplugged CT across the core curriculum.
Teachers considered abstraction–defined as the filtering of key details (Cetin & Dubinsky, 2017; Wing, 2008)–a good fit with their state K-5 language arts reading literature standards, from kindergarten: ”K.RL.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details,” to 5th grade: ”5.RL.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text. . . summarize the text.” (Oregon Department of Education, 2019). Their first attempts at integrating abstraction into their teaching of summary were unsatisfactory: the definition of abstraction by itself lacks pedagogical detail, and the underlying abstraction process–namely empirical abstraction (Beth & Piaget, 1974) through pattern recognition and decomposition (Kramer, 2007)–were tedious in use in the classroom.
To understand the nature of their struggle, researchers tasked seven random pairs of elementary teachers across different grades with writing summaries of the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears and did a comparative analysis of the results.
Their summaries contained wide variation in length (32 to 120 words) and in the amount of detail included (16 to 37 details). This variation was not correlated with teacher grade. More significantly, when compared with one another, each summary belied a specific focus. The two longest summaries focused on the sequence of events in the story, while the two shortest summaries used one or two sentences to describe each of the beginning, middle, and end sections of the story. In between were summaries that focused on protagonist impact, morality, and Goldilocks’s unique story structure.
We offer the following conjectures: 1) the focus of each summary was decided before details were chosen for the summary, thus acting as a type of overall framework to shape the summary; teachers used the framework to filter which details to include. 2) The framework was necessary because there is no context for the summary task. Abstractions can be informed by well-defined contexts (Hung et al., 2025). For example, consider the inside-flap of a book jacket: those summaries must introduce the protagonist, the protagonist’s dilemma, but must not give away the ending, all of which provide far more clarity than just ”must be short” and ”must contain key details”.
Through this analysis of teacher-written summaries, we propose that descriptions of the abstraction process should mention both the usefulness of abstract frameworks for scaffolding the abstraction process and also the identification of an abstraction’s context to better inform what details should be filtered.

Author

• Eping Hung, Southern Oregon University