A Case Study of How Kinesthetic Experiences Can Participate in and Transfer to Work with Equations

The broad goal of this report is to describe a form of knowing and a way of participating in mathematics learning that contribute to and further alternative views of transfer of learning. We selected an episode with an undergraduate student engaged in a number of different tasks involving a physical tool called “water wheel”. The embodied cognition literature is rich with connections between kinesthetic activity and how people qualitatively understand and interpret graphs of motion. However, studies that examine the interplay between kinesthetic activities and work with equations and other algebraic expressions are mostly absent. We show through this episode that kinesthetic experience can transfer or generalize to the building and interpretation of formal, highly symbolic mathematical expressions.