Contact:
- [tel] (510) 643 3599
- [email] dor <at> berkeley <dot> edu
- [www] http://gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/dabrahamson/dabrahamson.html
About Me: I was born in Haifa, Israel. My background is in cognitive psychology, which I studied at Tel Aviv University. Then I achieved a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and continued as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling. Once, I was a cellist.
Research Interests: I specialize in the study of mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning from the synergistic perspectives of cognitive science, socio-cultural theory, and educational semiotics. I investigate in particular the roles that mediated, reflexive interaction with a range of technologies plays in students' content-focused and intellectual development, which I view as trajectories from intuition to inscription. A core aspect of my professional practice is the design, production, implementation, and evaluation of innovative mixed-media concept-targeted curricular artifacts aligned with the emerging empiricism of individual cognition in social context. Operating in design-based research methodology, I am particularly interested in instances of spontaneous multimodal coordination of distributed epistemic and material resources and in the roles of teachers in facilitating conceptual insight. The work contributes toward developing rich models of cultural semiosis as well as principled methodology for actuating constructivist philosophy in the form of viable learning materials. In sum, I research the educational implementation of cognitively ergonomic mathematical semiotic artifacts -- proposed instructional materials and activity sequences designed to elicit and accommodate learners' tacit inferential cognitive mechanisms, which evolved for responding intelligently to quantitative properties inherent to natural situations -- and bridging these toward cultural formulations and practices.
I also explore the impact of Complexity Studies perspectives and methodologies on education research and have been arguing for the use of agent-based modeling to advance theory of individual learning in social context. During my tenure as a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, I developed computer-based modules for learning probability. I have published in the Handbook of Mathematical Cognition, Cognition and Instruction (in press), Educational Studies in Mathematics, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning (member of the editorial board), For the Learning of Mathematics, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, and the Journal of Statistics Education, I am a member of the editorial board of The Journal of the Learning Sciences, and I contribute regularly to major international conferences.
Current Research Foci: As part of my NAEd/Spender Postdoctoral Fellowship project, Seeing Chance, I am studying the multimodality of student engagement with artifacts as they problem-solve probability related situations. In practice, I elicit tacit imagistic aspects of students' probabilistic reasoning and then incorporate those apparent images into the selected/new/modified artifacts I am designing, so as to augment their expressivity and, thus, facilitate student passage from phenomenology to semiosis. I have honed this research into an investigation of how students come to synthesize tacit and cultural resources in developing deep understanding of mathematical concepts. I recently lectured on the crucial role that abductive reasoning plays in enabling this synthesis, and wrote on this design process (see also the accompanying data video clips and interactive modules). For the main, I create situations for which students can use their tacit knowledge to arrive at mathematically correct intuitive inferences. Next, I have the students construct mathematical models of these situations, only that I have modified these canonical models -- still keeping their mathematical integrity -- so that the students can bring to bear similar tacit knowledge in making sense of these tools. For example, I have students build the sample space of a binomial experiment and guide them to arrange it in a form resembling a histogram of the anticipated outcome distribution of the experiment. Paradigmatically, though, the designed model incorporates two competing objectifications of students' presymbolic tacit knowledge. Typically, students negotiate between their intuitive ways of looking at the world and the formal ways that they are to adopt if they are to participate in cultural practice. The cognitive process of reconciling these two views is the very stuff that conceptual learning is made of.
Thus, I study the nature of mathematics learning, a process that I theorize as the guided coordination of two types of multi-modal images: phenomenologically immediate and semiotically mediated perceptual constructions of problematized situations involving quantitative properties and relations.
Recently, I have become increasingly interested in identifying and articulating the tacit, informal pedagogical practice of parents in families with academic traditions. As a mother interacts with her toddler who is problem-solving a mechanical toy, how might she best balance his challenge and frustration, so that the child develops a sense of self-efficacy and the epistemic disposition that he can "solve the world?" How might we leverage insight into these implicit mediation strategies so as to document efficacious heuristics and, moreover, embed them in widely disseminated artifacts that will contribute to a broader inclusion of underprivileged populaces into intellectual trajectories?
Graduated Doctoral Students:
- Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell: Second Chance in First Life: Fostering Mathematical and Computational Agency Among At-Risk Youth (2009; now post-doctoral fellow at TERC)
Some Favorite Quotations:
- "It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent." (Jules Henri Poincaré, Mathematical Definitions in Education, 1904)
- "The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation." (Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935)
- "You can kill the King without a sword and you can light a fire without matches. What needs to burn is your imagination." (Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 1936)
- "Until cognitive scientists recognize this essential role of the body, their work will remain a mixed bag of ad hoc successes and, to them, incomprehensible failures." (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, 1999)
- "Most human beings do not see themselves, or their minds, as serving the process of evolution. Nevertheless, it would represent a major phase change in the evolution of human consciousness for such a realization to occur and to be acted upon. (Salk, Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason, 1983, p. 80)"
- "Of course naturalists seek to recast their tacit knowledge into propositional form as soon as possible, since, without so doing, they cannot communicate with others, and probably not even with themselves, about their findings. Yet to confine the inquiry itself only to those things that can be stated propositionally before the fact is unduly and insensibly limiting from the naturalist's viewpoint, since it eliminates to a large extent the predominant characteristic warranting the use of the human-as-instrument." (Guba & Lincoln, Educational Technology Research and Development, 1982, p. 245)
- "If you know something, then you know it -- it's the answer. But if you understand something, then you understand the question to get you to the answer, kind of." (DB, Grade 5 student, Seeing Chance project, California, Dec. 2005)