Teachers’ Experiences with and Perceptions of Virtual Manipulatives Following the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

While the use of virtual manipulatives (VM) is rising in classrooms, there is still limited research. regarding teacher experiences with and perceptions of virtual manipulatives. Most of the research regarding teacher perceptions of VM has focused only on short-term uses following professional development sessions and none has highlighted the experiences of teachers using them during emergency remote teaching during COVID-19. The purpose of this study was to explore teacher perceptions and. experiences with virtual manipulatives following emergency remote teaching during COVID-19. To achieve this, the researchers conducted an online survey to gather data on educator’s ( n = 103) experiences, perceptions, and usage of virtual manipulatives. The qualitative and quantitative data show that educators feel that VM are a valid and feasible support of mathematics instruction when physical manipulatives are not available. Results regarding usage of virtual manipulatives including frequency of use, standards taught, and types used are presented and discussed. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11528-022-00796-9.

Revisiting tools in numeracy learning: the role of authentic digital tools

“…Stronger meaning and understanding of a mathematical concept can lead to greater memory retention, and a more useful conceptualism that has transferability (Buckner et al, 1999;Sousa, 2015). Additionally, virtual manipulatives can simulate mathematical objects or scenarios that may be found in the real world (Carbonneau et al, 2013;Keldgord and Ching, 2022). The use of real-life contextualization of the mathematics has been shown to help with students' development mathematical concepts (Goos et al, 2012b;Gravemeijer et al, 2017;Nieminen et al, 2022).…”