Using Activity Theory to study the relationship between technology and the learning environment in the arithmetic domain

The advent of the microcomputer in the early 1980s brought with it high expectations regarding this tool's potential to drive change and innovation in schools. Although a number of projects have produced significant results at a research level, it is nevertheless true that these expectations appear to have remained largely unfulfilled (see Pelgrum, 1996; Andrew, 1999; Bottino & Furinghetti, 1998; Venezky & Davis, 2002). This is true also for disciplines, like mathematics, which, from the beginning, has been one of the most affected by educational research concerning the development and the use of ICT tools (Artigue, 2000). One of the main reasons for this (disregarding factors related to hardware availability and management, and to the traditional resistance of both the school system and teachers themselves to change) is that technology has often been introduced as an addition to an existing, unchanged classroom setting (De Corte, 1996). Often the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education has been linked to a vision of learning as an individual process whereby knowledge emerges from the interaction between the student and the computer. This vision is borne out by the terminology frequently adopted in the literature, where educational software applications are often referred to as learning environments, thus focusing attention on the fact that it is the software itself, through interaction with the student, that is to form the environment where learning can be developed. In this chapter, we analyze the relationship between advanced learning technologies and learning environments that arise from a different perspective. In adopting the term learning environment, we consider the teaching and learning situation as a whole. In other words we are interested in analyzing teaching and learning processes that happen within activity rich, interaction rich, culturally rich social environments, which the intelligent use of technology is making possible (De Figueiredo, 1999). In this framework ICT have an important role as Artefacts mediating teaching and learning processes, but they do not embody the entire learning environment. In the following, we briefly analyze the main aspects of evolution in educational computing research that have led to greater consideration for the learning environment as a whole (see also Bottino, 1994). Since different theoretical perspectives account for different ways of conceptualizing teaching and learning processes with ICT, it is necessary to explicit the framework from which the research questions discussed in this paper have been derived. Our work refers to Activity Theory and, in particular to the work of Cole and Engeström (1993). In this paper we analyze the main aspects of a methodology that has been derived from this theory. The Activity theory framework offers us an appropriate tool to instantiate the main relationships that characterized a learning environment. Practical examples of this instantiation are described making reference to a project involving the design, implementation and evaluation of an ICT-based system, the ARI-LAB2 system (Bottino & Chiappini, 1995). This system has been created for the development of arithmetic problem-solving capabilities with students in compulsory schooling. Hence, this project is reported here as an example of a practical application of the analysis methodology we have adopted to study the relationships between advanced technology and learning environment.