Challenges of Promoting Conceptual Change with Instructional Contexts

This chapter focuses on the interaction of two first graders as they attempt to make sense of a particular instructional context for learning negative numbers. The context is one where they move an elevator to a building’s floors above and below ground in order to model integer addition and subtraction problems. In particular, the focus of the activity was to discover that solving problems such as 4 – 1 and 1 – 4 will result in different answers. The two students misinterpret each other, model the problems in multiple ways with the elevator (and to varying extents), but also work cooperatively at times as they complete the activity. Their efforts highlight the difficulties they encounter when working with ready-made contexts and in obtaining solutions that do not fit their prior experiences. The results present a brief view of the conceptual change process and support a stronger focus on connecting to students’ prior thinking when introducing new instructional contexts.