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Enactive Modeling Hypothesis
Roth and Lawless (2001) note for example that
students' “gestures are an important means in the
construction of perception and communication
as students interact over and about a computer
software environment.” They suggest that learn-
ing environments that do not support students'
use of body and gesture can limit what and how
students learn.
Educational researchers have found evidence
linking students' kinesthetic behavior to their un-
derstanding of dynamic systems. Clement (1994)
and Reiner (2000) have found that both students
and experts may sometimes “describe a system
action in terms of a human action” and use ges-
tures that depict changes happening in a system.
They have interpreted these “self-projections”
as evidence that a person is mentally enacting or
simulating aspects of a system. Monaghan and
Clement (1999) observed students performing
hand motions and visualizations while using a
relative motion simulation. Other researchers
have referred to these kinds of self-projections as
anthropomorphic reasoning (Zohar & Ginossar,
1998) or anthropomorphic epistemology (Sayeki,
1989).
Sometimes these self-projections may even
underlie some of the misconceptions students have
in science, but they can also be used positively,
as a starting point for instruction. Susan Goldin-
Meadow and others have found that teachers using
gestures or attending to student gestures can make
math instruction more effective (Goldin-Meadow,
1999). Physics education researchers have also
found that kinesthetic real-time participation is
a key component responsible for the success of
microcomputer-based labs (MBL) in fostering
understanding of physics concepts and graph
interpretation skills (Beichner, 1990; Mokros &
Tinker, 1987). In MBL activities, students use
computers with sensors attached (distance, force,
temperature, etc.) to explore the changes that oc-
cur in physical phenomena.
Our hypothesis was that these kinesthetic activi-
ties are helping foster - yet also constrain - how
students “intentionalize” the phenomena about
which they are learning. They are connecting their
natural, embodied experience of phenomena to
the constraints and rules operating in scientific
representations of the phenomena, and conversely,
abstract scientific concepts are converted into
embodied metaphors which students can use. This
“exemplifies what we call symbolizing: a creation
of a space in which the absent is made present and
ready at hand” (Nemirovsky & Monk, 2000). More
generally speaking, Roth and Lawless (2002), like
Piaget, have argued that gestures can serve as a
bridge between our everyday experiences in the
physical world and the abstract scientific thinking
that is a goal of science instruction.
If anthropomorphic reasoning, gestures, and
self-projection help signify students' understand-
ings and misunderstandings of complex systems,
then it is possible that students may benefit by
instructional interventions that facilitate and
constrain their enactive participation with a
complex system. For this research, I explored a
new learner-centered simulation design strategy
that may be uniquely suited to helping students
understand complex changes happening in physi-
cal systems-
enactive modeling.
A simple example of this enactive modeling
strategy has been applied in physics education.
Students have difficulties understanding how
Newton's third law operates in static situations.
Given a situation in which a book lies atop a table,
students may recall that gravity pulls the topics
down, but they neglect the equal and opposite
upward force that the table exerts on the topic.
Various strategies have been used to help students
recognize this “passive” force, but an example of
an inactive modeling (or enactive participation)
strategy is for students to lie down on their backs
and hold topics up on their hands (Freudenthal,
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