Moving towards understanding: Students interpret and construct motion graphs

Abstract

Bodily experiences are associated with powerful forms of understanding, yet not much research has investigated to what extent bodily experiences benefit the development of graphical reasoning. We examined the effectiveness of providing embodied support in a teaching sequence of six lessons on motion graphs, including both graph interpretation and graph construction activities, on fifth-grade students' reasoning about graphically represented motion. Divided over nine classes 218 students took part in our study. Students in three classes received lessons on graphing motion with direct embodied support, three classes received lessons on graphing motion with indirect embodied support, and three classes served as a baseline condition and received lessons on a different mathematics topic. Development of students' graphical reasoning was measured on four measurement occasions. All students were given these same tasks four times with two months intervals. The teaching sequence on graphing motion took place either after the first, second, or third measurement. We used a cohort-sequential design to assess the intervention effect, the condition effect and the fading effect. Results showed that students improved their graphical reasoning at post-intervention-measurements when compared to their performance before the intervention. Moreover, students in the teaching sequence with direct embodied support showed a slightly larger gain in their graphical reasoning than students in the teaching sequence with indirect embodied support. These results suggest that embodied support as a learning facilitator can improve reasoning about graphing motion in primary school classrooms.