Percival Matthews

Predoctoral Fellow

M.A., University of Chicago, 2001

Advisor:Bethany Rittle-Johnson

AREAS OF INTEREST

• How choice of symbols used for teaching affects learning and transfer
• The concept and practice of scaffolding as it relates to (1) analogies as a key avenue for scaffolding, and (2) primary cognitive representations and the ways that symbols access them
• Designing practicable education interventions that can be effectively used by the average classroom teacher
• The use of teacher questioning (formative assessment) techniques to promote student engagement with educational stimuli (intention/attention, hierarchically guided)
• Delimiting the relationship between the constructs 'conceptual understanding' and 'procedural understanding'

KEYWORDS INTERESTS

• Mathematical and Verbal Reasoning
• Classroom Interventions
• Formative Assessment
• Conceptual/Procedural Understanding
• Bases for Scaffolding
• Symbols Representations

CURRENT RESEARCH TOPIC/FIELD-BASED PROJECT
Project: Investigating how using different symbolic representations of the same abstract principles affects learning and transfer of those principles. Multiple dimensions of symbols are manipulated and interpreted in terms a an explicit construct of symbolic concreteness.

FORMER EXPERIENCE
Staff development professional for K-12 public school teachers
Test prep instruction for ACT, SAT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT tests

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