Balachef students conceptions

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<p>Balacheff N., Gaudin N. (2002) Students conceptions: an introduction to a formal characterization. Cahier Leibniz 65</p> <p>Students conceptions: an introduction to a formal characterizationNicolas Balacheff, Nathalie Gaudin Laboratoire Leibniz IMAG, Grenoble, France</p> <p>Abstract: We investigate in this paper the complexity of modeling students knowing of mathematics under the constraints of acknowledging both their possible lack of coherency and their local efficiency. For this purpose we propose a formalization of the notion of conception as a possible tool to answer the epistemological problem we identify. We apply then this approach to the study of the possible conceptions of function, from an historical and then an epistemic point of view. We report the result of a case study in order to illustrate the benefit we expect from this approach. The notions of conception, knowing and concept are then related the one to the other within the model presented.</p> <p>1. FROM BEHAVIOR TO MEANINGThe only indicators we have of the good or of the bad functioning of teaching are students behaviors and productions, which are consequences of the knowing1 they have constructed and of their relationships to the content taught. But such evaluations are possible and their results are significant only in the case where one is able to establish a valid relationship between these observed behaviors and the considered knowledge itself. This relation between behaviors and knowing is crucial. It has been hidden as a result of the fight against behaviorism, but it has always been implicitly present in educational research at least at the methodological level. The key issue is that the meaning of a piece of knowledge cannot be reduced to behaviors, but on the other hand meaning cannot be characterised, diagnosed or taught without linking it to behaviors. Such a link was clearly pointed out by Schoenfeld in 1987, in a book he edited under the title Cognitive Science and Mathematics Education. In the Introduction to the book he associates the Cognitive Science approach to an effort toward a more detailed description of problem-solving behaviors so that they could be then taught and reproduced. This position of Schoenfeld is synthesised by the following indication about his own research at this time: My intention was to pose the question of problem-solving heuristics from a cognitive science perspective: What level of details is needed to describe problem-solving strategies so that students can actually use them? (ibid. p.18). Such a problmatique opens on two essential questions: - On one hand, to which extent a finer granularity of a description would guarantee a better reliability of the transfer from one operator to an other? Or, rather, for any competency, does it exist a level of granularity, which gives an intrinsic guarantee for the efficiency of such a transfer? - On the other hand, to which extent a finer description of problem-solving behaviors informs about the relationships between behaviors and knowings? Concerning the second question, we must notice that Schoenfeld himself finally suggests that this relationship is essential in the chapter of his book devoted to constuctivismbut may be without drawing all the consequences from this remark. The question of the relationships between behaviors and knowings is considered as fundamental to the theory of didactical situations (Brousseau 1997)2. One of its postulates is that each problem-situation demands on the part of the student behaviors which are indications of knowing. This fundamental correspondence, established case by case, is justified by the interpretation of problem-situations in terms1 We follow the choice made for the translation of Brousseaus work (1997), to use knowing as a noun to distinguish</p> <p>the students personal constructs from knowledge which refers to intellectual constructs recognised by a social body. This intends to keep the distinction made in French between connaissance and savoir. 2 For the convenience of the English speaking reader, we will take all the references to Brousseau's contributions to mathematics education from the book published in 1997 by Kluwer, but it should be noticed that the work we refer to was primarily published between 1970 and 1990.</p> <p>1</p> <p>Balacheff N., Gaudin N. (2002) Students conceptions: an introduction to a formal characterization. Cahier Leibniz 65</p> <p>of game, and by the interpretation of behaviors in terms of indication of strategies the adapted nature of which must be demonstrated in the model or representation attributed to the student (Brousseau 1997, p.215). This postulate is shared by some approach in Cognitive Science: All behavior implies a knowing, writes Pichot (1995, p.206)3. Indeed, this postulate justifies most of our experimental research since students behaviors are the source of the corpus on which we perform our analysis. But to cut out a behavior from the observation of a so-called reality, which could be a classroom or a laboratory experiment, is both a methodological and a theoretical problem as Robert emphasizes (1992, p.54). An observed behavior is not given by the reality but taken out of it as a result of a decision taken by an observer. If a behavior is the description of material relationships between a person and her environment, then it depends on the characteristics of the person as well as on the characteristics of her environment. A good example is the case of instruments which at the same time facilitate action if the user holds the required knowing, and on the other hand limit this action because of their own limitations (Rabardel 1995, Resnick &amp; Collins 1994, p.7). Actually, one should notice that these limitations could be related to material constraints as well as to the knowings involved in the design of these instruments. Person and environment refer to complex realities of whose not all aspects are relevant for the type of questioning we are considering. What is of interest for us is the person from the point of view of her relationship to a piece of knowledge. For this reason we will refer from now on to the subject as a reduction of the person to her cognitive dimension. In the same way, we are not interested by the environment in all its complexity, but only by its features which are relevant with respect to a given piece of knowledge. We will call milieu such a subset of the environment of a subject; the milieu is a kind of projection of the environment onto its epistemic dimension. Indeed, in the case of mathematics, knowings are not only the consequences of the interaction between a subject and a material milieu, but they involve also interactions with systems of signifiers produced by the subject herself, or by others. We must then extend the classical idea of milieu in order to integrate symbolic systems and social interaction as means for the production of knowings. This is the meaning of Brousseaus proposal to define the milieu as the subject's antagonist system in the learning process (Brousseau1997 p.57). So, we do not consider a knowing as a property which can be ascribed only to the subject, nor only to the milieu4. On the contrary we consider it as a property of the interaction between the subject and the milieuits antagonist system. This interaction is meaningful because it succeeds in fulfilling the necessary conditions for the viability of the subject/milieu system. By viability we mean that the subject/milieu system has a capacity to recover an equilibrium following some perturbations; what implies that the perturbation is recognized by the subject (for example, a contradiction or an uncertainty). In some cases the subject/milieu system may even evolve if the perturbations are such that this is necessary. This is, in other words, a formulation of Vergnaud's postulate that problems are the source and the criteria of knowings (Vergnaud 1981 p.220). Problem means here a more or less serious perturbation of the subject/milieu system. The existence of a knowing can then be evidenced by its manifestation as a problem-solving tool, what is reified as behaviors of the subject/milieu system as it overcomes the perturbations in order to satisfy its constraints of viability. These constraints do not address the way the equilibrium is recovered but the criterion of this equilibrium (we could also say that there is not only one way to know.) Following Stewart (1994 pp. 2526) we would say that these constraints are proscriptive, what means that they express necessary conditions to ensure the system viability, and that they are not prescriptive since they do not tell in details in which way an equilibrium must be reconstructed (and we may add here that the descriptions searched for by Schoenfeld sound more prescriptive than proscriptive).</p> <p>3 A statement which echoes the classical Piagetian position that Furth (1969) reminds us in his presentation of the</p> <p>theoretical foundation of constructivism: Piaget identifies active intelligence with behavior (focusing on the structural characteristic of adaptative behaviors, ibid. p.170). What means that intelligence is not a thing that causes intelligent behavior; it is intelligent behavior in its active structure and essential aspects, which we for the sake of verbal economy call intelligence (ibid. p.175). 4 Taking into account a remark from one of the referees on a previous version of this article, it appears necessary to acknowledge clearly the close relationship between what is stated in the article and Piaget constructivism. But a key difference must be emphasized: our focus is on the whole system [SM] and not on one of its parts. In other words, our concern is not to know how the subject think, but to be able to give account of the whole system in a way relevant to a didactical projectthe cognitive system we consider is not S but [SM].</p> <p>2</p> <p>Balacheff N., Gaudin N. (2002) Students conceptions: an introduction to a formal characterization. Cahier Leibniz 65</p> <p>We can now propose a definition of the meaning of a knowing which can be pragmatically and efficiently used in a didactical problmatique. A knowing is characterised as the state of dynamical equilibrium of an action/feedback loop between a subject and a milieu under proscriptive constraints of viability.</p> <p>action S feedback M</p> <p>contrainsts</p> <p>Figure 1. Following the didactical problmatique we are interested by the nature of the proscriptive constraints that the subject/milieu system must satisfy. Among these constraints, not known exhaustively, we can mention two that are specific to didactical systems: time constraints and epistemological constraints (Arsac et al. 1992). The former are due to the way schooling is organized (duration of school life, organization of the school year, organization of the lessons, etc.). The latter is due to the existence of a knowledge of reference which underlies any content to be taught and which de facto provides criteria to the acceptability of any learning outcome. The role of the teacher, with respect to a given content to be taught, is to organize the encounter between a subject and a milieu so that a knowingwhich can be seen as acceptable with respect to the didactical intentioncan emerge from their interaction. Such an encounter is not a trivial event. To be in an environment is not enough for the student to be able to read in it the milieu relevant to the teaching purpose (Balacheff 1998). To select the relevant features of the environment, to identify the feedback and to understand it with respect to the intended target of action is not self-evident. The means for the teacher, to succeed in this task is to construct a situation that allows the devolution to the students of both the milieu and the relevant relationships (action/feedback) to this milieu. But the didactical intention of such a situation can act as a constraint; this is the case when the student believes in a teacher expectation, what could modify the nature of the subject/milieu system equilibrium and then the nature of the related knowing. But this is the basic complexity of didactical systems. Learning is a process of reconstruction of an equilibrium of the subject/milieu system which has been lost following perturbations of the milieu, or perturbations of the constraints on the system, or even perturbations of the subject itself (modification of his or her intentions, or as a consequence of a brain disease, etc.). The didactical problmatique considers the case of perturbations provoked on purpose, with the intention to stimulate learning. The indicator of a perturbation is the gap, recognized by the subject, between the expected result of an action and the actual feedback from the milieu. This means on one hand that the subject is able to recognize the existence of a gap not acceptable with respect to her intention, and on the other hand that the milieu can provide identifiable feedback. Sometimes the subject does not identify a gap whereas we, as observers, identify that one should have been recognized. We call this unnoticed gap an error when it is the symptom of a knowing, that is: the symptom of the resilience of a previous equilibrium of the subject/milieu system. As it is now well accepted, not all errors are negative. For the construction of certain knowings it is even better to be aware of some errors and to overcome them. For example, uniform convergence is a very powerful concept whose construction often proceeds via errors due to a common idea of conservation of certain properties of functions (like the statementfalse in generalthat the limit of a series of continuous function is a continuous function). But if research has been able to show in some cases that erroneous knowings could be necessary to the meaningful learning of some concepts, it has left open the question of the control on the means allowing their overcoming. The knowing source of errors could be locally refuted, but it could keep some validity even with respect to the knowledge of reference, which may be seen as providing to it a domain of validity (the 3</p> <p>Balacheff N., Gaudin N. (2002) Students conceptions: an introduction to a formal characterization. Cahier Leibniz 65</p> <p>concept of uniform convergence allows to express the domain of validity of the so-called principle of conservation of some properties). But even when this erroneous knowing is rejected and replaced by a new one, it may keep a pragmatic validity (decimal numbers are not natural numbers with a dot, but to consider them as such is quite useful insofar as computation is concerned). The consequence is the possibility of earliest knowings persisting despite their refutation, simultaneously with new knowingswhat is likely to instigate yet the idea of an incoherent and unstable knowing subject.</p> <p>2. AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM2.1. COHERENCE AND SPHERE OF PRACTICEIn the diagram of the calendar, the complete series of the temporal o...</p>


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