Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, April 13-17.
We highlight two features of students’ experiences as they engage in task-oriented pedagogical activities: the evocation of prior knowledge schemes and the enactment of situated practice. The former treats learners’ sense-making perceptuo-motor activity as they engage in problem-solving (“bottom up” assimilatory attempts). The latter treats learners’ non-analytical observations and/or attempts to emulate a demonstrated spatial-temporal sequence of artifact-centric goal states (“top down” sociocultural factors). We interpret these features as both essential and complementary in mediated conceptual development as well as its theorization. We demonstrate the analytic utility of this approach using empirical data from case studies involving students’ interactions with designs for embodying rational number concepts. We conclude with implications for design.