Touchy Feely Affordances of Digital Technology for Embodied Interactions Can Enhance 'Epistemic Access'

Abstract

There have been numerous studies since Papert on the efficacy of technological interventions on students' learning of content, especially in science and mathematics. However, there seems to be a limited acknowledgement of all the affordances of the technology as reflected in the dominant usage to provide physical access. By physical access, we indicate how technology enables wider access by delivering content in the form of videos, animations, ebooks etc. We bring in a subtle different aspect of epistemic access and explore this in the context of vectors, a topic introduced in pre-university (grade-11 in India) physics and mathematics. Literature reports students' difficulties with geometrical aspects of vectors. We designed Touchy Feely Vectors (TFV), a dynamic geometric environment with carefully designed (embodied and conceptually meaningful) interactions making use of the novel affordances of interaction with the content and addressing the student difficulties with the geometric aspects. This was informed by the recent emphasis in cognitive sciences on the role of the body's interaction with the environment in cognition. We report a study in six grade-11 classrooms (3 experimental and 3 control classrooms with a total of 266 students). The results show effects on their reasoning approaches and an enhanced cognitive engagement (which we call epistemic access) in the experimental group. Using this evidence, we argue for a need for further careful explorations of affordances of digital technology to provide wider epistemic access.