You are invited to this week’s special talk organized by the Department of Psychology.
Everyone is welcome to attend!
Title: Building attentional anchors: Educational design-based research on the sensorimotor roots of mathematical reasoning
Speaker: Dr. Dor Abrahamson is a Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Education
Date: 26.09.2025, Friday
Time: 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Room: A 130 (FEASS Building)
Abstract:
What if learning a mathematical concept were the same as catching a baseball? In this talk, I will try to convince you that performing these two activities utilizes essentially the same cognitive capacity, namely both involve imagining perceptual structures to perform manual actions. If this true, then we could consider a mathematics pedagogy that creates opportunities for students to ground new concepts in perceptual solutions they generate spontaneously to solve motor-control problems. I will demonstrate one such activity, the Mathematics Imagery Trainer for Proportion, which exemplifies the action-based genre of the embodied design framework.
Biography
Dor Abrahamson (PhD, Learning Sciences) is a Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Education, where he directs the Design-Based Research Laboratory (est. 2005). Working with his students and international collaborators, Abrahamson innovates pedagogical resources, both mechanical and digital, for diverse populations; in turn, evaluating these applications provides an empirical context to investigate and theorize socio-cognitive processes of conceptual change. Abrahamson is particularly interested in embodiment perspectives on the roles of sensory perception and motor action in mathematics teaching and learning.