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Reflections on learning and cognition

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Abstract

The occasion of my 9th ICME—the first being in Berkeley in 1980, the most recent being in Seoul in 2012—provides an opportunity for reflecting on changes in the field over more than 30 years. “Learning and cognition” have a very different meaning now than they did in 1980. I argue that in various ways, the papers in this volume (derived from the ICME 12 Topic Study Group on Learning and Cognition) represent a significant evolution of the field—with mathematical sense making being a central conception, and with the evolution of the very notions of learning and cognition to include embodied, sociocultural, and historical perspectives. In this volume one sees a focus on classroom activities as they engender aspects of sense making, framed in ways that were not even part of the discourse on learning in 1980; one also sees a widely varied set of research methods for addressing such issues. I reflect on the state of the art, and then discuss some possibly productive directions with regard to the characterization and support of mathematically productive classrooms.

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Notes

  1. Table 1 is reprinted from Schoenfeld (2014). All of the documents referred to in this section (collectively known as the “TRU Math Suite”) can be downloaded from http://ats.berkeley.edu/tools.html and http://map.mathshell.org/materials/trumath.php.

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  1. Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education, Education, EMST, Tolman Hall # 1670, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1670, USA

    Alan H. Schoenfeld

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Schoenfeld, A.H. Reflections on learning and cognition. ZDM Mathematics Education 46, 497–503 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-014-0589-8

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