Enacting Viewing Skills with Apps to Promote Collaborative Mathematics Learning

This paper comprises discussion on the research findings of this study into how apps can be used in the classroom to collaboratively promote construction of mathematical knowledge in children in ways that fundamentally transform the instructional environment. The study results identify how children enact viewing skills through digital texts to acquire new knowledge in their addition and subtraction learning. These skills enable children to externalise their understanding and internalise new meaning-making when interacting with peers. The problems presented to the participants were non-routine and immersive through externalising understanding with behavioural intensity and emotional quality at optimal levels. The subsequent enactment of the viewing skills led to the internalisation of the new knowledge. However, these dual reciprocal learning approaches require due consideration of elements of the learners’ personalities, the rules of the learning games, and the community settings of the classroom, all of which are crucial in determining the learners’ engagement in a learning activity and active involvement in associated learning processes. A detailed examination of the meaning-making processes through which viewing skills mediate children’s knowledge acquisition while seamlessly switching between individual and social interactions has led to the development of the framework of the preschool classroom self-directed mathematics learning.