Introduction
In order to define instrumentation in the context of mathematics education, it is necessary to define instruments: at this stage of this entry, we do not differentiate between instruments and artifacts, i.e., regard them as things that are created and used by humans to help, assist, support, enlarge, empower their activity. Instrumentation is the action to give someone an instrument, or the action by which someone acquires an instrument, in order to perform a given activity. The notion of instrumentation is part of a network of concepts; we will focus here on the main dialectical relationships between them.
Instrumentation and Instruction
Contrary to the common perception that mathematics is a pure mental activity, the importance of tools in mathematical activity has been largely acknowledged: “many of the actions of doing mathematics involve selecting, using and creating tools.” (Monaghan et al. 2016, p. 4). What is true in general is all the more true for these...
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Notes
- 1.
An instrument is here defined as a mixed entity composed of a part of the artifact and a scheme, a scheme being, according to Vergnaud (1996), the invariant organization of activity to perform a type of task, including rules of action and specific knowledge, produce and spring of the activity.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ghislaine Gueudet and Birgit Pepin for their reading of the first version of this article.
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Trouche, L. (2018). Instrumentation in Mathematics Education. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_80-3
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