Learning to “See” Less Than Nothing: Putting Perceptual Skills to Work for Learning Numerical Structure

Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content

“…Although there are some theoretical arguments for how labs could contribute to learning, such as the cognitive benefits of multiple representations [35,36], physical manipulatives [37][38][39], or embodied cognition [40,41], there is little in the design of these lab activities to realize such potential benefits. There are several limitations of this work.…”

Ready student one: Exploring the predictors of student learning in virtual reality

“…Through these concrete representations of an otherwise abstract phenomenon, learners develop their conceptual and mechanistic understandings of the phenomenon [22]. By manipulating physical objects, students can see deep features of the phenomena, allowing them to effectively integrate the features into their mental models of the phenomena [20,24].…”

“…There are several ways in which embodiment is argued to support learning, generally tied to a hypothesis whereby activities help move cognition from abstract to concrete representations of a phenomenon [16].Two such notions of embodied cognition focus on how learners off-load cognitive work on to the environment and how off-line cognition is body-based [15,19]. These notions suggest physical aspects of cognition, whereby learning is supported through engaging perceptuo-motor systems [20]. Indeed, nearly all science education advocates for the use of interactive hands-on activities [21].…”

“…Through these concrete representations of an otherwise abstract phenomenon, learners develop their conceptual and mechanistic understandings of the phenomenon [22]. By manipulating physical objects, students can see deep features of the phenomena, allowing them to effectively integrate the features into their mental models of the phenomena [20,24].Two other notions of embodied cognition focus on how cognition is situated within the real-world and that the learning environment is part of the cognitive system [15,19]. Because the knowledge learned is tied to the environment in which it was learned, it is argued that there are limitations to applying the knowledge in new environments [25].…”

How the Abstract Becomes Concrete: Irrational Numbers Are Understood Relative to Natural Numbers and Perfect Squares

“…Referential processing also extends to more abstract number systems. With integers, zero can be used as a referent when performing magnitude comparison, number line estimation, number bisection, and arithmetic computation (Gullick & Wolford, 2013;Tsang & Schwartz, 2009;Tsang et al, 2015;Varma & Schwartz, 2011). Fractions are often processed by referencing unit fractions like ½ when making magnitude comparison and number line estimation judgments (Fazio et al, 2016;Siegler & Thompson, 2014).…”