Abstract
We investigated whether or not hand placement affects people’s ability to apply learned mathematical information in new and familiar contexts. Participants learned a set of arithmetic facts presented one way (i.e., in a × b = c format) and then were tested on those same facts shown in either a novel format (b × a = __) in Experiment 1 or in the previously-learned format (a × b = __) in Experiment 2. Throughout study and test, participants’ hands were either near to or far from the stimuli. Performance on the novel format was worse when the hands were near compared to far, but performance on the previously-learned format did not depend on hand placement. Together, results indicate that hand proximity impairs mathematical performance when performance depends on the abstracting of conceptual information from sensory information. We conclude that hand placement may be involved in the application of knowledge.
Highlights
We investigated whether or not hand placement affects people’s ability to apply learned mathematical information in new and familiar contexts
These results provide tentative support for both the disrupted reading hypothesis and the impaired abstraction hypothesis, both of which had predicted that performance should have been worse near the hands—for different reasons
In Experiment 1, the sensory information changed from study to test such that performance depended on participants’ ability to apply their knowledge of previously-learned math facts to new instances
Summary
We investigated whether or not hand placement affects people’s ability to apply learned mathematical information in new and familiar contexts. One recent meta-analysis of 66 studies suggests that virtual manipulatives can offer consistent benefits to learning and student achievement across many areas of mathematics and across several grade levels (MoyerPackenham & Westenskow, 2013; see Moyer-Packenham & Westenskow, 2016) These benefits have been linked to several possible factors, but one important aspect of virtual manipulatives seems to be the manner in which they focus and constrain attention toward the mathematical task at hand. Pressing on an illustration that animates one of the characters or triggers a sound effect in an e-book can draw attention away from the story being told The presence of these hotspots is, associated with lower levels of learning, possibly because they distract children from the to-be-learned material (Takacs et al, 2015). In one review of 33 eye-tracking studies investigating e-learning (predominately with undergraduate populations) it was suggested that interactivity can lead to an unnecessary increase in cognitive load by forcing learners to balance their attention between what they are interacting with and the text they are reading (Yang et al, 2018)
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