Toward Sense Making With Grounded Feedback

Grounded feedback aims to facilitate sense making by reflecting students' symbolic input in a linked concrete representation that is easier to reason with. Initial studies led to explorations of what prior knowledge is necessary to support that reasoning. Specifically, we tested if it is obvious to students that a sum is larger than its two positive addends. It is not! Thus, concrete representations for sense making may fail because students lack prerequisite knowledge we may assume they have. More generally, these results suggest that skilled qualitative reasoning may often come after, not before, quantitative reasoning.