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Keynote Address: Tools for Thinking

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The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

The content of thought can be regarded as internalized and intermixed perceptions of the world and the actions of thought as internalized and intermixed actions on the world. Reexternalizing the content of thought onto something perceptible and reexternalizing the actions of thinking as actions of the body can facilitate thinking. New technologies can do both. They can allow creation and revision of external representations and they can allow interaction with the hands and the body. This analysis will be supported by several empirical studies. One will show that students learn more from creating visual explanations of STEM phenomena than from creating verbal ones. Another will show that conceptually congruent actions on an iPad promote arithmetic performance. A third will show that when reading spatial descriptions, students use their hands to create mental models.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia Teachers College, New York City, NY, USA

    Barbara Tversky

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Barbara Tversky

Authors
  1. Barbara Tversky
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Correspondence to Barbara Tversky .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University, Sketch Recognition Lab, College Station, Texas, USA

    Tracy Hammond

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University, Sketch Recognition Lab, College Station, Texas, USA

    Stephanie Valentine

  3. Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Aaron Adler

  4. Dept. Information Technology, Whitfield School, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

    Mark Payton

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Tversky, B. (2015). Keynote Address: Tools for Thinking. In: Hammond, T., Valentine, S., Adler, A., Payton, M. (eds) The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15593-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15594-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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