Conférences plénières > Lindsey Richland

Developing an analogical mind: implications for learning and teaching mathematics

Children’s development of analogical thought shapes their cognition and future learning, supporting problem solving, inferencing based on prior knowledge, and acquisition of abstract schemas.  This talk will describe data from the mathematics domain indicating that building relational mindsets - the tendency to spontaneously notice and attend to domain relations – may be a particularly impactful mechanism for supporting teaching and learning by analogy. I will describe data indicating that relational mindsets may be relatively stable across task contexts and can predict learning from new representations. Mindsets may develop through a combination of socialization and maturation, with specific evidence emerging from everyday talk in the forms of relational langauge and open-ended questioning, in addition to age and Executive Functions. I’ll review these theoretical findings, and introduce new directions in generative AI to build these principles into constructive instructional resources.