Identifying What Is Critical for Learning ‘Rate of Change’: Experiences from a Learning Study in Sweden

Abstract

Learning study is an adapted version of lesson study developed in Hong Kong and Sweden. It has commonalities with lesson study but is framed within a specific pedagogical learning theory – variation theory. Central in variation theory is the object of learning and what is critical for students’ learning. Hence, as with lesson study, it is a collective and iterative work where teachers explore how they can make the object of learning available to students, but what characterises learning study is the use of a specific learning theory. In this process, special attention is paid to the critical aspects of the object of learning. We argue that to identify the aspects that are critical, the aspects need to be verified and refined in classrooms. In this chapter, we demonstrate how teachers gain knowledge about such critical aspects. Particularly, we show how these critical aspects cannot be extracted only from the mathematical content or the students pre-understanding alone, but evolve during the learning study cycles. For this we use a learning study about the mathematical topic of rate of change in grade 9 in Sweden as an illustration. We describe how an analysis of how students solved tasks in pre- and post-test and during the lessons, as well as how the mathematical content was presented in lessons, helped the teachers identify what was critical for learning to understand and express the rate of change for a dynamic situation.