TRADEOFFS OF SITUATEDNESS: ICONICITY CONSTRAINS THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONTENT-ORIENTED SENSORIMOTOR SCHEMES

• In Event: TECHNOLOGY: EXPLORING SENSORIMOTOR SCHEMES

Description

Mathematics education practitioners and researchers have long debated best pedagogical practices for introducing new concepts. Our design-based research project evaluated a heuristic framework, whereby students first develop acontextual sensorimotor schemes and only then extend these schemes to incorporate both concrete narratives (grounding) and formal mathematical rules (generalizing). We compared student performance under conditions of working with stark (acontextual) vs. iconic (situated) manipulatives. We found tradeoffs of situatedness: Whereas iconic objects elicit richer narratives than stark objects, these narratives may detrimentally constrain the scope of potential sensorimotor schemes students develop in attempt to solve manipulation problems.

Authors

• Dana Rosen, University of California, Berkeley

• Alik Palatnik, UC Berkeley

• Dor Abrahamson, University of California, Berkeley