Exploring the affordances of a worked example offloaded from a textbook

Abstract

In designing a set of instructional materials to use in his classroom, a teacher heavily offloaded items (e.g., worked examples, practice questions, exercises) from school-based materials and textbooks. At a cursory level, one may easily dismiss this as a thoughtless lifting of curricular materials. But upon careful analysis – as is detailed in this paper – a different picture emerges. In this paper, we describe and analyse how this teacher adapted one of many worked examples, beyond its typical use, during instruction to develop students’ conceptual understanding of proportionality. We argue that he noticed and harnessed multiple affordances in a single item that most teachers may overlook, without the need to modify the example, and propose a notion of “affordance space” as a lens to view teachers’ design of instructional materials.