Trninic, D., & Abrahamson, D. (2011). Emergent ontology in embodied interaction: automated feedback as conceptual placeholder. 

In L. R. Wiest & T. Lamberg (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 1777-1785). Reno, NV: University of Nevada, Reno.

Recent theories of cognition model human reasoning as tacit simulated action. Implications for the philosophy, design, and practice of mathematics instruction may be momentous. We report on findings from a pioneering design-based research study into the embodied roots of proportional reasoning that also explored the pedagogical potential of embodied-interaction (EI), a form of technology-enabled immersive activity. 22 Grade 4-6 individual/paired interviewees remote-controlled virtual objects in a non-symbolic space to solve a problem, then progressively mathematized their strategy using symbolic artifacts interpolated into the space. Drawing on qualitative analyses of the filmed work, we build a sociocognitive account of the role of automated feedback in the mediated construction of perceptuomotor schemes that undergird conceptual development, and we offer a heuristic EI design framework.

TrninicAbrahamson2011-PME-NA.pdf