Aspects that Affect Whole Number Learning: Cultural Artefacts and Mathematical Tasks

The core of this chapter is the notion of artefact, starting from the discussion of the meaning of the word in the literature and offering a gallery of cultural artefacts from the participants’ reports and the literature. The idea of artefacts is considered in a broad sense, to include also language and texts. The use of cultural artefacts as teaching aids is addressed. A special section is devoted to the artefacts (teaching aids) from technologies (including virtual manipulatives). The issue of tasks is simply skimmed, but it is not possible to discuss about artefacts without considering the way of using artefacts with suitable tasks. Some examples of tasks are reported to elaborate about aspects that may foster learning whole number arithmetic (WNA). Artefacts and tasks appear as an inseparable pair, to be considered within a cultural and institutional context. Some future challenges are outlined concerning the issue of teacher education, in order to cope with this complex map.