Research impacting on student learning: how construction tasks influenced learners’ thinking

Abstract

Research is commonly conceived as an exocentric process where one person probes the behaviour of another. While in many cases the intention of the researcher is to gather information about the learner, the study described in this paper illustrates how research can have an impact on student learning in terms of revealing to the learner aspects of the topic that were not previously focused upon. Twenty five students studying A-level and undergraduate engineering, pure mathematics and education were invited to construct relevant mathematical objects meeting specified constraints. Having constructed these examples, learners displayed a range of awareness of the effect of the construction tasks on their understanding of the concepts involved.