Building educational activities for understanding: An elaboration on the embodied-design framework and its epistemic grounds

Abrahamson, Dor

doi:10.1016/j.ijcci.2014.07.002

Cited by 87 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Moreover, we perceive the Mathematical Imagery Trainer activities as creating conditions for students to reflect in retrospect on solutions they have already demonstrated in action. We thus reaffirm our earlier implication of the body as the vanguard of mathematical reasoning (Abrahamson, 2014, 2015): We submit that embodied solutions to coordination problems can exhibit quantitative relations that exceed the individual’s current mathematical knowledge. We further submit that educational technology for sensorimotor mathematical grounding should therefore create conditions for students to enact dynamical instantiations of concepts at the cusp of their conceptual grasp.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 78%

“…Whereas we hesitate to make causal claims regarding the role of AAs in successful learning with tablet applications, the strong correlations among perception, action, performance, and utterance surely point to promising lines of research, which will hopefully result in creating heuristic design frameworks for educational applications within the field of mathematics. Such frameworks could be informed by ‘embodied design’ (Abrahamson, 2014). In particular, industry informed by embodied design would seek to build touchscreen tablet applications that create opportunities for students to solve motor-action problems designed specifically so as to give rise to targeted proto-conceptual AAs that in turn can assist in reflective abstraction.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Touchscreen Tablets: Coordinating Action and Perception for Mathematical Cognition

et al. 2017

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Proportional reasoning is important and yet difficult for many students, who often use additive strategies, where multiplicative strategies are better suited. In our research we explore the potential of an interactive touchscreen tablet application to promote proportional reasoning by creating conditions that steer students toward multiplicative strategies. The design of this application (Mathematical Imagery Trainer) was inspired by arguments from embodied-cognition theory that mathematical understanding is grounded in sensorimotor schemes. This study draws on a corpus of previously treated data of 9–11 year-old students, who participated individually in semi-structured clinical interviews, in which they solved a manipulation task that required moving two vertical bars at a constant ratio of heights (1:2). Qualitative analyses revealed the frequent emergence of visual attention to the screen location halfway along the bar that was twice as high as the short bar. The hypothesis arose that students used so-called “attentional anchors” (AAs)—psychological constructions of new perceptual structures in the environment that people invent spontaneously as their heuristic means of guiding effective manual actions for managing an otherwise overwhelming task, in this case keeping vertical bars at the same proportion while moving them. We assumed that students’ AAs on the mathematically relevant points were crucial in progressing from additive to multiplicative strategies. Here we seek farther to promote this line of research by reanalyzing data from 38 students (aged 9–11). We ask: (1) What quantitative evidence is there for the emergence of AAs?; and (2) How does the transition from additive to multiplicative reasoning take place when solving embodied proportions tasks in interaction with the touchscreen tablet app? We found that: (a) AAs appeared for all students; (b) the AA-types were few across the students; (c) the AAs were mathematically relevant (top of the bars and halfway along the tall bar); (d) interacting with the tablet was crucial for the AAs’ emergence; and (e) the vast majority of students progressed from additive to multiplicative strategies (as corroborated with oral utterances). We conclude that touchscreen applications have the potential to create interaction conditions for coordinating action and perception into mathematical cognition.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Touchscreen Tablets: Coordinating Action and Perception for Mathematical Cognition

et al. 2017

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“…It is clearly not the case, however, that any body movement will engender learning, and recent studies of embodied learning have focused on the notion of congruency (Johnson-Glenberg et al, 2014;Segal, 2011)-a condition under which movements or body positioning map coherently onto a particular conceptual domain. Designing learning environments that effectively create the conditions for embodied learning is becoming an emerging area of research and design (e.g., Abrahamson, 2014;Author, 2013, Author, 2014Black, Segal, Vitale, & Fadjo, 2011).…”

Section: Embodied Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing learning and engagement through embodied interaction within a mixed reality simulation

Lindgren

Tscholl

Wang

et al. 2016

Computers & Education

385

232

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Computer simulations have been shown to be effective instruments for teaching students about difficult concepts, particularly in the STEM disciplines. Emerging interface technologies are expanding the modalities with which learners can interact with these simulations, but the effects of these new interactions on conceptual understanding and student engagement have not been examined in great depth. We present here a study where middle school students learned about gravity and planetary motion in an immersive, whole-body interactive simulation, and we compared their learning and attitudes about science with students who used a desktop version of the same simulation. Results of the study indicate that enacting concepts and experiencing critical ideas in physics through whole-body activity leads to significant learning gains, higher levels of engagement, and more positive attitudes towards science.

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“…Following principles of the embodied design framework, we build tools whose operatory function is engineered specifically so as to demand, and therefore cultivate, the development of particular sensorimotor schemes as a condition for masterful control of the environment in accord with task demands. In so doing, we target specific sensorimotor schemes that, through instructional guidance, will come to ground the mathematical concepts we want these students to learn (Abrahamson, 2014; Abrahamson & Trninic, 2015). …”

Section: Learning Is Moving In New Ways: Designing For the Emergence mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making sense of movement in embodied design for mathematics learning

Abrahamson

Bakker

2016

Cogn. Research

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Embodiment perspectives from the cognitive sciences offer a rethinking of the role of sensorimotor activity in human learning, knowing, and reasoning. Educational researchers have been evaluating whether and how these perspectives might inform the theory and practice of STEM instruction. Some of these researchers have created technological systems, where students solve sensorimotor interaction problems as cognitive entry into curricular content. However, the field has yet to agree on a conceptually coherent and empirically validated design framework, inspired by embodiment perspectives, for developing these instructional resources. A stumbling block toward such consensus, we propose, is an implicit disagreement among educational researchers on the relation between physical movement and conceptual learning. This hypothesized disagreement could explain the contrasting choices we witness among current designs for learning with respect to instructional methodology for cultivating new physical actions – whereas some researchers use an approach of direct instruction, such as explicit teaching of gestures, others use an indirect approach, where students must discover effective movements to solve a task. Prior to comparing these approaches, it may help first to clarify key constructs. In this theoretical essay we draw on embodiment and systems literature as well as findings from our design research so as to offer the following taxonomy that may facilitate discourse about movement in STEM learning: (1) distal movement is the technologically extended effect of physical movement on the environment; (2) proximal movement is the physical movements themselves; and (3) sensorimotor schemes are the routinized patterns of cognitive activity that become enacted through proximal movement by orienting on so-called attentional anchors. Attentional anchors are goal-oriented phenomenological objects or enactive perceptions (“sensori-”) that organize proximal movement to effect distal movement (“-motor”). All three facets of movement must be considered in analyzing embodied learning processes. We demonstrate that indirect movement instruction enables students to develop new sensorimotor schemes including attentional anchors as idiosyncratic solutions to physical interaction problems. These schemes are, by necessity, grounded in students’ own agentive relation to the world while also grounding target content such as mathematical notions.

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Building educational activities for understanding: An elaboration on the embodied-design framework and its epistemic grounds

Cited by 87 publications

References 81 publications

Touchscreen Tablets: Coordinating Action and Perception for Mathematical Cognition

Touchscreen Tablets: Coordinating Action and Perception for Mathematical Cognition

Enhancing learning and engagement through embodied interaction within a mixed reality simulation

Making sense of movement in embodied design for mathematics learning

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