A Surprising Result

Some recent research suggests that teaching math with concrete examples only muddies the waters:

…many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more
examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is
that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University
are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be
better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real
world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations…

This presents a problem for statisticians, since we maintain a tight link between the theoretical and applied parts of our discipline.  This result certainly helps to explain a phenomenon that has heretofore puzzled me:  many of the math majors who take my courses do fine on the theory problems, but struggle with data organization, programming, and other applied statistics problems.