This past Thursday, September 8, 2016, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Elise Lockwood from Oregon State University for our first fall colloquium! The video of her talk can be found here. Details on Dr. Lockwood’s talk are below.
Dr. Elise Lockwood giving the introduction to her fantastic talk
to UGA students and faculty
Title:
Investigating Students’ Generalizing Activity: Two Contrasting Cases from and Undergraduate Combinatorial Context
Abstract:
Dr. Elise Lockwood provides two contrasting cases of students who solved a series of combinatorial tasks that were designed to facilitate generalizing activity. In these cases, each student generated what externally appeared to be the same representation – a general outcome structure that both students spontaneously developed. However, upon further examination, the ways in which the two students’ understood and subsequently used the general representation differed significantly. Lockwood seeks to explain these differences by identifying two types of relating that emerged in the study, and by connecting this relating to Piaget’s notion of reflective abstraction. By comparing and contrasting these students, we gain insight into the kinds of activity that promote both efficacious generalization and robust combinatorial reasoning. Lockwood concludes with implications and directions for further research.