Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC, April 8 – 12.
The combination of two recent technological developments—natural-user interfaces (NUI) and multimodal learning analytics (MMLA)—is creating new opportunities for educational researchers to investigate empirically historical hypotheses on the emergence of concepts from situated sensorimotor activity. 56 students (9-14 yo) solved a tablet-based manipulation task designed to foster grounded meanings for mathematical concepts. Data gathered include action logging, eye-gaze tracking, and videography. Successful task performance coincided with the spontaneous emergence of stable dynamical gaze-path patterns followed by quantitative articulation of strategy. We interpret the findings as enabling us to revisit, support, refine, and elaborate seminal claims in Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology and in particular his insistence on the role of situated motor-action coordination in the process of reflective abstraction.