RME Query

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 13:33:45 -0700 (PDT)

I have been reading the Cobb articles in three recent publications
and from what I have I cannot tell what sort of evaluations have
been done on the Realistic Mathematics Education programs. Have they
been used on a wide scale? Is there anything comparable to the evaluations
of change in the Brown/Campione et al communities of learners studies?

I have been wondering about the practical implications of our discussion
on the transmission/emergence discussion of weeks past (wow did that go
silent quickly when it went!). For a while I thought that it would be
reasonable to argue that there were none. Both positions fall within
a set of activity-based, small group, pedagogy and those have repeatedly
been shown to work so long as they are well supported. So what difference
does it make if you use rogoff or cobb or vygotsky or Feurerstein as
your starting point?

Here's something I noticed. Because Paul is concerned that children's
encounters with meanings not be with the "already-given", or perhaps
ought not to be played out on the territory of the already-given, he
uses materials for which there are no easy ready-to-hand meanings, like
packing cubes into wrappers, 10 to a wrapper. So there is at least an
aspect of practice that is clearly guided by a theoretical concern.

Which may be a useful thought to someone
Or not.
mike

PS- I sure would like a ref to a closely evaluated study of RME!