Exploring students adaptive use of domain specific knowledge

Abstract

Adaptive use of meaningful knowledge is widely adopted as key learning objective in the changing society. This paper presents the results of a teaching experiment in the domain of partitive division. It is designed to explore how grade-3 students do adapt personal knowledge to the variation in task conditions. Under the first condition groups of four and six students explore the process of distributing 52 carts between four/six persons. They can use 52 unifix cubes to model the process directly. The second condition requires that they mentally anticipate the results of sharing the same quantity of carts between respectively two and three children. The study shows that the variation in conditions combined with classroom climate challenge a great part of the students to use adaptively “pieces of knowledge” acquired in different areas of reasoning in equal group situations.