Séminaire LPNC : Helena OSANA (University Concordia, Montréal)

Teachers of elementary mathematics use a variety of different instructional materials in the classroom to support children’s learning. One of the primary research objectives in the Mathematics Teaching and Learning Lab (MTLL) in the Department of Education at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, is to examine the impact of the perceptual features of external knowledge representations on children’s knowledge of concepts central to the elementary mathematics curriculum. My presentation will be based on recent studies in the MTLL on the affordances of instructional materials on children’s knowledge of place value, unit coordination, and fraction division in partitive and quotative contexts. Other factors that have emerged from our data that may play a role in the effects of perceptual features, such as prior knowledge and actions with manipulatives, will be discussed.