Paul Cobb – författare

This volume grew out of a symposium on discourse, tools, and instructional design at Vanderbilt University in 1995 that brought together a small international group to grapple with issues of communicating, symbolizing, modeling, and mathematizing, particularly as these issues relate to learning in the classroom. The participants invited to develop chapters for this book--all internationally recognized scholars in their respective fields--were selected to represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives including mathematics education, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, and discourse theory. The work is distinguished by the caliber of the contributors, the significance of the topics addressed in the current era of reform in mathematics education, and the diversity of perspectives taken to a common set of themes and issues. The book is intended for those who are seeking to expand their understanding of the complexity of learning in order to enhance the learning experiences students have in schools, primarily researchers, instructional designers, and graduate students in mathematics education, as well as those in other fields including science education, instructional design in general, discourse theory, and semiotics.

This volume grew out of a symposium on discourse, tools, and instructional design at Vanderbilt University in 1995 that brought together a small international group to grapple with issues of communicating, symbolizing, modeling, and mathematizing, particularly as these issues relate to learning in the classroom. The participants invited to develop chapters for this book--all internationally recognized scholars in their respective fields--were selected to represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives including mathematics education, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, and discourse theory. The work is distinguished by the caliber of the contributors, the significance of the topics addressed in the current era of reform in mathematics education, and the diversity of perspectives taken to a common set of themes and issues. The book is intended for those who are seeking to expand their understanding of the complexity of learning in order to enhance the learning experiences students have in schools, primarily researchers, instructional designers, and graduate students in mathematics education, as well as those in other fields including science education, instructional design in general, discourse theory, and semiotics.

Chemists, working with only mortars and pestles, could not get very far unless they had mathematical models to explain what was happening "inside" of their elements of experience -- an example of what could be termed mathematical learning. This volume contains the proceedings of Work Group 4: Theories of Mathematics, a subgroup of the Seventh International Congress on Mathematical Education held at Université Laval in Québec. Bringing together multiple perspectives on mathematical thinking, this volume presents elaborations on principles reflecting the progress made in the field over the past 20 years and represents starting points for understanding mathematical learning today. This volume will be of importance to educational researchers, math educators, graduate students of mathematical learning, and anyone interested in the enterprise of improving mathematical learning worldwide.

Chemists, working with only mortars and pestles, could not get very far unless they had mathematical models to explain what was happening "inside" of their elements of experience -- an example of what could be termed mathematical learning. This volume contains the proceedings of Work Group 4: Theories of Mathematics, a subgroup of the Seventh International Congress on Mathematical Education held at Université Laval in Québec. Bringing together multiple perspectives on mathematical thinking, this volume presents elaborations on principles reflecting the progress made in the field over the past 20 years and represents starting points for understanding mathematical learning today. This volume will be of importance to educational researchers, math educators, graduate students of mathematical learning, and anyone interested in the enterprise of improving mathematical learning worldwide.

This book grew out of a five-year collaboration between groups of American and German mathematics educators. The central issue addressed accounting for the messiness and complexity of mathematics learning and teaching as it occurs in classroom situations. The individual chapters are based on the view that psychological and sociological perspectives each tell half of a good story. To unify these concepts requires a combined approach that takes individual students'' mathematical activity seriously while simultaneously seeing their activity as necessarily socially situated. Throughout their collaboration, the chapter authors shared a single set of video recordings and transcripts made in an American elementary classroom where instruction was generally compatible with recent reform recommendations. As a consequence, the book is much more than a compendium of loosely related papers. The combined approach taken by the authors draws on interactionism and ethnomethodology. Thus, it constitutes an alternative to Vygotskian and Soviet activity theory approaches. The specific topics discussed in individual chapters include small group collaboration and learning, the teacher''s practice and growth, and language, discourse, and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. This collaborative effort is valuable to educators and psychologists interested in situated cognition and the relation between sociocultural processes and individual psychological processes.

This book grew out of a five-year collaboration between groups of American and German mathematics educators. The central issue addressed accounting for the messiness and complexity of mathematics learning and teaching as it occurs in classroom situations. The individual chapters are based on the view that psychological and sociological perspectives each tell half of a good story. To unify these concepts requires a combined approach that takes individual students'' mathematical activity seriously while simultaneously seeing their activity as necessarily socially situated. Throughout their collaboration, the chapter authors shared a single set of video recordings and transcripts made in an American elementary classroom where instruction was generally compatible with recent reform recommendations. As a consequence, the book is much more than a compendium of loosely related papers. The combined approach taken by the authors draws on interactionism and ethnomethodology. Thus, it constitutes an alternative to Vygotskian and Soviet activity theory approaches. The specific topics discussed in individual chapters include small group collaboration and learning, the teacher''s practice and growth, and language, discourse, and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. This collaborative effort is valuable to educators and psychologists interested in situated cognition and the relation between sociocultural processes and individual psychological processes.