When to Use Manipulatives: A Review of Research on the Effects of Manuipulatives on Learning and Motivation

• In Event: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Evidence Relevant to Classroom Instruction With Manipulatives

Abstract

Educators often use manipulatives in educational settings because they believe that manipulatives increase motivation and help students to connect real-world knowledge with abstract concepts learned in class (e.g., Ball, 1992), and therefore, support learning and transfer. However, support for this view from the educational research literature is mixed and systematic reviews are rare (but see Carboneau, Marley, & Selig, 2013, for a meta-analysis on the use of concrete manipulatives in mathematics). Furthermore, this literature is not tightly grounded in the theoretical and empirical tradition of cognitive and educational psychology, which has produced a body of research on the use of different external knowledge representations (i.e., learning materials, like figures, formulas, pictures, texts, etc.). Considering manipulatives as a special type of external knowledge representation, we have reviewed the educational and the cognitive psychological research, and developed an organizing framework regarding the use of external knowledge representations.
Specifically, we classify external knowledge representations according to three characteristics: 1) grounded in a concrete context and including only relevant features, 2) grounded and including irrelevant features, and 3) idealized (i.e., stripped of any context information or surface details). We evaluate the effect of these different types of knowledge representations on important educational outcomes; namely, learning and immediate performance, transfer, and motivation (see Table 1 for a broad overview of results). This framework and review can prove useful for both educators and researchers.
For example, consider a teacher developing an instructional activity on fraction addition. Depending on her learning objectives, our review offers a number of suggestions. If the teacher wants to ensure that her students quickly become capable of solving fraction addition problems, she would be best served by using a grounded representation with relevant features, such as creating word problems about sharing pizzas. If her main objective is to get her students interested in fractions, more generally, she may wish to include irrelevant features, such as including toppings on the representations of pizzas, as this will help low-interest students to feel engaged with the materials. However, these irrelevant features will likely slow the learning process, so she may have to devote more time to the topic. If the teacher’s main goal is for her students to construct knowledge about fraction addition that is transferable, it would be best to avoid the context of pizzas when using circles. Unfortunately, using idealized representations might lower students’ interest and motivation, and possibly require more instructional time.
Of course, it would likely be the aim of the teacher to foster immediate learning, transfer, and motivation. Thus, an open question for researchers remains; how can the different kinds of external representations be used in instructional sequences to maximize learning efficiency, knowledge transfer, and student motivation? There are a small number of studies examining this issue, and this framework can help better organize these studies going forward.
The proposed framework can guide educators as they design instruction, as well as inform researchers about pressing questions left unanswered by current research.

Authors

• Daniel M. Belenky, Pearson Education, Inc.

• Lennart Schalk, ETH Zurich