Principled by the Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition paradigm, the study investigated the impact of using a research-based curriculum that employs multiple modalities on the performance of grade 5 students on 3 subscales: concept of unit, fraction equivalence, and fraction comparison. The sample included five schools randomly selected from a population of 14 schools in Lebanon. Eighteen 5th grade classrooms were randomly assigned to experimental (using multimodal curriculum) and control (using a monomodal curriculum) groups. Three data sources were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data: tests, interviews, and classroom observations. Quantitative data were analyzed using two methods: reliability and MANOVA. Results of the quantitative data show that students taught using the multimodal curriculum outperformed their counterparts who were instructed using a monomodal curriculum on the three aforementioned subscales (at an alpha level =. 001). Additionally, fine-grained analysis using the semiotic bundle model revealed different semiotic systems across experimental and control groups. The study findings support the multimodal approach to teaching fractions as it facilitates students’ conceptual understanding.

Key words: embodied, situated, and distributed learning, fractional knowledge, multimodality, solution schemes, theorems-in-action.

Discusses the implications of information processing psychology for mathematics education, with a focus on the works of schema theorists such as D. E. Rumelhart and D. A. Norman and R. Glaser and production system theorists such as J. H. Larkin, J. G. Greeno, and J. R. Anderson. Learning is considered in terms of the actor’s and the observer’s perspective and the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge. Comprehension and meaning in mathematics also are considered. The role of abstraction and generalization in the acquisition of mathematical knowledge is discussed, and the difference between helping children to “see, ” as opposed to construct abstract relationships is elucidated. The goal of teaching is to help students modify or restructure their existing schema in predetermined ways by finding instructional representations that enable students to construct their own expert representations.

This article pulls into the empirical realm a longstanding theoretical debate about the prior knowledge students bring to bear when learning scientific concepts and representations. Misconceptions constructivists view the prior knowledge as stable alternate conceptions that apply robustly across multiple contexts. By contrast, fine-grained constructivists believe that much of students’ intuitive knowledge consists of unarticulated, loosely connected knowledge elements, the activation of which depends sensitively on context. By focusing on students’ intuitive knowledge about representations, and by fleshing out the two constructivist frameworks, I show that they lead to empirically different sets of predictions. Pilot studies demonstrate the feasibility of a full-fledged experimental program to decide which flavor of constructivism describes students more adequately.

Key words: constructivism, misconceptions, p-prims, conceptual change, representations.

This article presents a case study of a seven-year-old girl named Amanda who participated in an eighteen-week teaching experiment I conducted in order to model the development of her intuitive and informal topological ideas. I designed a new dynamic geometry environment that I used in each of the episodes of the teaching experiment to elicit these conceptions and further support their development. As the study progressed, I found that Amanda developed significant and authentic forms of geometric reasoning. It is these newly identified forms of reasoning, which I refer to as “qualitative geometry,” that have implications for the teaching and learning of geometry and for research into students’ mathematical reasoning. Relevance: This article describes a study for which I used Steffe & Thompson’s teaching experiment methodology to produce a learning trajectory (Steffe 2003, 2004) resulting from the actual teaching of children. In order to perform the conceptual analysis, the theoretical framework draws on von Glasersfeld’s scheme theory, which is an interpretation of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

This article communicates findings from a year-long constructivist teaching experiment about the relationship between four sixth grade students’ multiplicative structures and their construction of improper fractions. Students’ multiplicative structures are the units coordinations that they can take as given prior to activity – i.e., the units coordinations that they have interiorized. This research indicates that the construction of improper fractions requires having interiorized three levels of units. Students who have interiorized only two levels of units may operate with fractions greater than one, but they don’t produce improper fractions. These findings call for a revision in Steffe’s hypothesis (Steffe L. P. (2002). A new hypothesis concerning children’s fractional knowledge. Journal of Mathematical Behavior 20: 267–307) that upon the construction of the splitting operation, students’ fractional schemes can be regarded as essentially including improper fractions. While the splitting operation seems crucial in the construction of improper fractions, it is not necessarily accompanied by the interiorization of three levels of units. Relevance: This article takes a radical constructivist approach to mathematical learning and develops local theory about how students’ units coordinations are related to the fraction schemes they can construct.

To understand relationships between students’ quantitative reasoning with fractions and their algebraic reasoning, a clinical interview study was conducted with 18 middle and high school students. Six students, with each of three different multiplicative concepts, participated. This paper reports on the fractional knowledge and algebraic reasoning of six students with the most basic multiplicative concept. The fractional knowledge of these students was found to be consistent with prior research, in that the students had constructed partitioning and iteration operations but not disembedding operations, and that the students conceived of fractions as parts within wholes. The students’ iterating operations facilitated their work on algebra problems, but the lack of disembedding operations was a significant constraint in writing algebraic equations and expressions, as well as in generalizing relationships. Implications for teaching these students are discussed. Relevance: In this paper the author uses second-order models of students’ multiplicative concepts and fractional knowledge built from radical constructivism to explore relationships between students’ fractional knowledge and algebraic reasoning. The paper is therefore one contribution to the construction of second-order models of students’ algebraic reasoning, which is sorely needed by the field of mathematics education, particularly for students who struggle to learn algebra.

Three iterative, after school design experiments with small groups of middle school students were conducted to investigate how students represent fractional relationships between two unknowns and whether they construct reciprocal reasoning with unknowns. Of the 22 students who participated, 9 had constructed fractions as multiples of unit fractions. Seven of these 9 students constructed reciprocal reasoning with unknowns. They did so by constructing a multiplicative relationship between a unit fraction of one unknown and the other unknown. The other 2 students did not make this construction. Instead, they represented relationships between unknowns with whole number multiplication and division, and by adding unknowns and fractional parts of unknowns. The students who constructed reciprocal reasoning demonstrated a link between fractions as measures and fractions as operators, one benefit of working on rational number knowledge and algebraic reasoning together. Implications for teaching include recommendations for supporting students to construct reciprocal reasoning with unknowns.

In this study, we challenge the deficit perspective on mathematical knowing and learning for children labeled as LD, focusing on their struggles not as a within student attribute, but rather as within teacher-learner interactions. We present two cases of fifth-grade students labeled LD as they interacted with a researcher-teacher during two constructivist-oriented teaching experiments designed to foster a concept of unit fraction. Data analysis revealed three main types of interactions, and how they changed over time, which seemed to support the students’ learning: Assess, Cause and Effect Reflection, and Comparison/Prediction Reflection. We thus argue for an intervention in interaction that occurs in the instructional process for students with LD, which should replace attempts to “fix” ‘deficiencies’ that we claim to contribute to disabling such students.

Key words: constructivism, student-teacher interaction, mathematics, intervention, learning difference

This commentary addresses the role of theoretical frameworks in building models of students’ mathematics. Specifically, it compares ways that the Learning Through Activity framework (LTA) and scheme theory explain and predict students’ mathematical activity. Both frameworks rely on Piagetian constructs – especially reflective abstraction – to build explanatory models for teaching and learning. LTA attempts to provide the teacher-researcher with a greater degree of determination in student learning trajectories, but then the teacher-researcher must address constraints in the students’ available ways of operating. These issues are exemplified in the case of teaching students about multiplying fractions. Additional theoretical issues arise in explaining logical necessity in students’ ways of operating and the role of reflective abstraction in organizing new ways of operating.