Future Directions for Theory and Research with Instructional Manipulatives:Commentary on the Special Issue Papers

Professional organizations, educators, and researchers have proposed that instruction with manipulatives is an effective classroom teaching technique. As examples, both the National Council for the Teaching of Mathematics (NCTM 2008) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC 2009) recommend manipulatives play a prominent role in classroom instruction. These recommendations are intuitively appealing as there are many circumstances in which representing the world through physical action with concrete objects occurs naturally. For example, an experienced outdoorsperson providing complicated directions to a desired location in the mountains is a circumstance that lends itself to the use of manipulatives. If a verbal description fails, the outdoorsperson may gather some rocks, sticks, and other convenient objects to construct a rough model on the ground of the local topography. In this manner, the spatial relations of the landscape can be efficiently relayed to the neophyte adventurer for cognitive processing in real time. It is anticipated that the adventurer will be able to later visualize this rough mapping of landmarks with objects while in the field. Classroom teachers often support learning in similar manners to the outdoorsperson introducing a novice to an unfamiliar region. In formal instructional contexts, teachers of academic topics may deliver instruction by encouraging learner interactions with manipulatives that represent core concepts. The underlying theoretical expectation in these circumstances is students will derive similar benefits in terms of online and offline cognitive processing as those garnered from representing a landscape with readily available objects. However, unlike the spontaneous mapping provided by the outdoorsperson, which has a fairly discrete outcome (i.e., successful navigation of a constrained region), teachers likely assume and desire generalization to a multitude of abstract learning outcomes (i.e., transfer of learning, Barnett and Ceci 2002; Martin and Schwartz 2005). Manipulatives used in formal learning contexts may be perceptually more or less grounded in terms of representational properties (Belenky and Schalk 2014/this issue). In addition, the instructional guidance in classrooms may differ considerably from that provided by the experienced outdoorsperson in our illustration. As an example, when teaching about the Educ Psychol Rev DOI 10.1007/s10648-014-9259-1