Journal of Mathematical Behavior 52 (2018) 201–207

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Journal of Mathematical Behavior

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmathb

Frameworks for modeling students’ mathematics

T
Anderson Norton
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0123, United States

ABS TRA CT

This commentary addresses the role of theoretical frameworks in building models of students’
mathematics. Specifically, it compares ways that the Learning Through Activity framework (LTA)
and scheme theory explain and predict students’ mathematical activity. Both frameworks rely on
Piagetian constructs—especially reflective abstraction—to build explanatory models for teaching
and learning. LTA attempts to provide the teacher-researcher with a greater degree of determi-
nation in student learning trajectories, but then the teacher-researcher must address constraints
in the students’ available ways of operating. These issues are exemplified in the case of teaching
students about multiplying fractions. Additional theoretical issues arise in explaining logical
necessity in students’ ways of operating and the role of reflective abstraction in organizing new
ways of operating.

Mathematics education is a scientific field only to the extent that our community engages in building explanatory models for
processes of teaching and learning mathematics. When we move beyond a behaviorist paradigm, which equates observable behaviors
with cognition, building models of students’ mathematical learning becomes a kind of inverse problem: How can we infer students’
mathematical knowledge from their observable behaviors? Steffe (1991) made an important distinction between the mathematical
structures that teachers/researchers attribute to students and the mathematics that students construct. The latter is inaccessible to
teachers/researchers and often occurs outside of the students’ own awareness. Scientific research on mathematical learning involves
attributing structures to students that consistently explain and predict behaviors observed when students are engaged in mathe-
matical tasks (cf., von Glasersfeld & Steffe, 1991).
Solutions to the inverse problem rely on frameworks for defining and relating constructs used to build models. Simon and his
research team attempt to solve the problem using the Learning through Activity framework (LTA). This commentary focuses on the
way LTA draws upon Piagetian theory (Beth & Piaget, 1966; Piaget, 1970a, 1970b) and how LTA compares to scheme theory, which
builds upon the same foundation. Because LTA and scheme theory both rely heavily on Piaget’s work, the first two sections of this
commentary elaborate on constructs that Piaget used to explain mathematical development.
The first section describes two kinds of structures that Piaget (1970b) used to model mathematical knowledge: schemes and
groups. Whereas schemes are used to model all kinds of knowledge, the group structure is particular to mathematics and is often
overlooked. The second section focuses on reflective abstraction—a theoretical process critical to Piaget’s explanation of mathe-
matical development (Beth & Piaget, 1966) and one that plays a central role in both LTA and scheme theory. The third section
compares how LTA and scheme theory frame and utilize Piagetian theory to explain students learning in the case of multiplying
fractions. The commentary concludes by leveraging that case to answer the following questions:

• How does LTA support model building?

• How does its explanatory and predictive power compare to scheme theory?

E-mail address: norton3@vt.edu.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2018.03.001
Received 1 November 2017; Received in revised form 1 February 2018; Accepted 1 March 2018
0732-3123/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A. Norton Journal of Mathematical Behavior 52 (2018) 201–207

Fig. 1. von Glasersfeld’s three-part action scheme.

• What theoretical problems does it solve and what new problems arise?
1. Mathematical structures

Reflective abstraction plays a particularly prominent role in Mathematical Epistemology and Psychology—a book Piaget co-authored
with mathematician Evert W. Beth (Beth & Piaget, 1966). Piaget needed the construct to explain the development of logico-math-
ematical operations (a point previously emphasized by Dubinsky, 1991). Conversely, logic and mathematics are the only domains to
which reflective abstraction applies. Children develop all kinds of concepts through activity, including the development of language
through social interaction. Moreover, children can learn to perform these actions in imagination (e.g., imagine kicking a ball).
However, only in logic and mathematics do we take actions themselves as the objects of study and organize them as operations within
structures for composing and reversing them (e.g., partitioning a whole into five equal parts and then iterating one of those parts five
times to restore the whole). Piaget accounted for this unique feature of logico-mathematical operations by positing the structure of
groups, in addition to the more generally applicable structure of schemes. “Intuitions become transformed into operations as soon as
they constitute groupings which are both composible and reversible” (Piaget, 1968, p. 49). This section elaborates on both structures
and compares them to the goal-action structure presented in LTA.

1.1. Schemes

Piaget (1970a) used the construct of schemes to explain and emphasize the dynamic nature of knowledge. Concepts are not static;
rather, they arise through action. von Glasersfeld (1995) described an action scheme as a three-part structure containing a re-
cognition template, a sequence of actions, and an expected result (see Fig. 1). Following Piaget, von Glasersfeld used this structure to
explain learning through the dual processes of assimilation and accommodation.
This tripartite pattern, I believe, is crucial for the proper understanding of the functioning of assimilation and accommodation.
The ‘recognition’ in part 1 is always the result of assimilation… The activity, part 2, then produces a result which the organism
will attempt to assimilate to its expectation, part 3. If the organism is unable to do this, there will be a perturbation. (p. 65).
The goal-action construct in LTA closely resembles two parts of the tripartite scheme structure, as did the activity-effect construct
that Simon had previously developed with Tzur (Simon, Kara, Placa, & Avitzur, this issue; Simon, Tzur, Heinz, & Kinzel, 2004).
Whereas reflection on activity-effect relations places emphasis on the last two parts of the three-part scheme structure, LTA focuses on
the first two parts. Collapsing the first and third parts of the three-part structure is justified in the sense that the recognition of a
situation for which a scheme might apply (part 1) includes some degree of anticipation (expectation) for the result of applying it (part
3). This anticipation especially holds for operational schemes wherein the actions no longer need to be carried out, even in imagi-
nation (Piaget, 1970a); the whole three-part scheme collapses into a single concept (cf., Hackenberg, 2007), which aligns with Tzur
and Simon’s (2004) description of anticipatory schemes. In that sense, the goal-action construct of LTA is another description of a
scheme as long as we understand that goals are the result of having already assimilated an experience into a scheme.
Several mathematics education researchers have employed scheme theory to build models of students’ mathematics (e.g.,
Hackenberg, 2007; Olive & Vomvoridi, 2006; Tzur, 1999). They have used schemes within those models to (1) explain the students’
problem solving behavior; (2) explain the learning process; and (3) predict what kinds of tasks will support their learning. In
particular, Steffe and Olive (2010) have used models of students’ mathematics to explain how students make sense of fractions. In
addition to identifying a progression of fractions schemes, the researchers describe how those schemes are constructed on through
organizations of operations such as unitizing, partitioning, iterating, and disembedding. In fact, Steffe’s (2002) reorganization hy-
pothesis posits that children construct many of these operations in the context of learning about whole numbers and that they
reorganize those operations to construct fractions schemes.
With regard to the third purpose (predicting learning), Steffe described a zone of potential construction (ZPC) to identify the
operations that a student has available (within the teacher-researcher’s model of the student’s mathematics) and which schemes the
student might construct from those operations. The ZPC construct functions like Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development
(ZPD) except that ZPC identifies opportunities for student learning based on potential reorganizations in students’ existing mathe-
matics rather than mathematics that pre-exists external to the student (Norton & D’Ambrosio, 2008). Steffe and colleagues use ZPCs
in teaching experiments to provoke the construction of new mathematical schemes through mathematical tasks, as we will examine in
the case of fraction multiplication (Hackenberg & Tillema, 2009). Teaching students by provoking and facilitating students’ con-
structions of schemes has always been the goal of Steffe’s work: “We conduct teaching experiments in order to learn how to teach”
(personal communication, June 9, 2004).

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The main distinction between Simon’s approach and Steffe’s approach pertains to the degree of causality or predetermination the
teacher is supposed to have over a student’s learning. During a teaching experiment, scheme theorists generally intend for students to
construct more powerful ways of operating by extending the scope of their existing schemes (generalizing assimilation) or re-
organizing the operations within those schemes to form new schemes (functional accommodation), as predicted by the teacher-
researcher’s models of the students’ mathematics and their ZPCs. The new schemes are more powerful in the sense that they can be
used to solve problems that existing schemes do not. Postulating the constraints of a student’s existing schemes, the teacher-re-
searcher can design tasks through which the student might experience those constraints, inducing a perturbation, as described by von
Glasersfeld (1995). Postulating the student’s available operations, the teacher-researcher can envision how the student might address
the perturbation and restore equilibrium to her ways of operating. The teacher can then design tasks to elicit new uses of existing
operations. However, tasks do not determine the manner in which the student reorganizes her available operations.
Simon’s team “decided not to use the construct of scheme because of its origin in explaining learning as resulting from pertur-
bation” (Simon, Kara, Placa, & Sandir, 2016, p. 80). LTA seeks to engineer task sequences that influence students’ particular choices
among available actions. In engineering such task sequences, LTA attempts to remove uncertainty about whether or how a student
might resolve a perturbation. At the same time, LTA must avoid the danger of equating mental actions with behavioral activity
associated with the tasks themselves.
A second problem for LTA is to explain how logico-mathematical operations arise in the first place. This problem applies to
scheme theory as well. The three-part structure of a scheme explains its role in assimilation and accommodation, but it does not
explain how operations arise from actions. Simon et al. (2016) noted this limitation of schemes: “We also found that the tripartite
model of a scheme was less easily used to portray our understanding of the development of new, higher level concepts through
reflective abstraction” (p. 80). However, the goal-action construct of LTA does not adequately solve the problem either. Nor does it
explain the logical necessity of mathematical ways of operating, which depends on reversibility of the operations within a closed
system (Piaget, 1970b). To explain the construction of logical-mathematical operations and logical necessity, Piaget (1970b) in-
troduced a different kind of structure: groups.

1.2. Groups

Within an action scheme, actions appear in sequence. In an operational scheme, that sequence is collapsed, just as it is collapsed in
the development of new concepts within the goal-action construct of LTA. Thus, there appears a kind of simultaneity in operational
schemes and mathematical concepts that does not appear in action schemes—“an extra-temporal character, which is the peculiarity
of pure logico-mathematical relationships” (Piaget, 1970a, p. 46). To explain the logical necessity of logico-mathematical operations,
Piaget (1970b) relied on the structure of groups (and group-like structures, called groupings):
Now the group concept or property is obtained, not by this sort of abstraction, but by a mode of thought characteristic of modern
mathematics and logic—‘reflective abstraction’—which does not derive properties from things but from our ways of acting on
things, the operations we perform on them. (p. 19)
Piaget and Inhelder (1967) provided the group of displacements as an example of a group structure that children construct,
demonstrating that space cannot be taken for granted as an innate concept. Infants begin to construct space through self-locomotion,
controlling their experiences through the coordination of their own activity. They learn that moving their bodies in one direction
changes their perceptual experience and that moving in an opposite direction restores it. They also learn that two movements can be
combined to create a new movement and that various combinations of movements can lead to the same place.
These features of reversibility, composibility, and associativity define the formal structure of a mathematical group. The group
structure explains how children learn to take space as a single entity in which to locate places and objects, and how children become
aware of the possibility of movements that they have not yet performed. However, as Piaget (1970a, 1970b) repeatedly warned, this
does not imply that children are aware of group structures themselves. After all, schemes and groups are researcher constructs used to
explain the logic behind observed behaviors.
Groups describe how operations are organized within reversible and composible structures (Piaget, 1970b). The reversibility of
operations within the group structure explains their logical necessity: “Because every operation is reversible, an ‘erroneous result’ is
simply not an element of the system” (p. 15). The coordination of operations within groups, independent of particular schemes or
concepts, explains why students operate at the same stage across mathematical domains. For example, students who operate at a
particular stage of units coordination experience similar affordances and constraints across the contexts of whole number multi-
plication, fractions knowledge, and algebraic reasoning (Hackenberg & Lee, 2015). Indeed, the basis for Steffe’s (2002) re-
organization hypothesis is that students who have constructed particular whole number schemes are poised to construct corre-
sponding fractions schemes by reorganizing their existing operations at the same stage.
LTA addresses the issue of reversibility by referring to six forms that a task might take in relating an input, process, and result.
There are six combinations formed by taking any of the three elements as an unknown in either the forward process or its inverse. If
coordinated with one another, these six forms of reversibility might constitute a kind of logical necessity, but their logical necessity
remains unclear because their coordination as operations or concepts (rather than tasks) is unspecified.

2. The role of reflective abstraction

“If a concept is the result of reflective abstraction, that is, an abstraction derived from activity, then it should be possible to

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engineer a sequence of tasks that elicits appropriate activity and promotes abstraction from that activity” (Simon, Kara, Placa, &
Avitzur, this issue, p. 26). This quote succinctly captures the motivation for LTA, and it represents a broad interpretation of reflective
abstraction—one that would apply to the construction of any new mathematical concept or scheme. This section introduces
“functional accommodation” and “generalizing assimilation” as descriptors for mathematical learning that do not involve reflective
abstraction. In fact, LTA drew upon generalizing assimilation in attempting to foster a unified meaning for multiplication (gen-
eralizing from whole number to fractions and mixed numbers), but the researchers did not classify it as concept formation, pre-
sumably because it only involves modifying an existing concept rather than constructing a new one (Simon, Kara, & Placa, this issue).
The same might be said for functional accommodation, but at least in that case, new actions/operations are involved.
Piaget (1970a, 1970b) described reflective abstraction as involving a reorganization of actions/operations at a higher level—-
something that does not always occur in mathematical learning and something that does not occur in the context of solving any
particular task. LTA captures one important aspect of reflective abstraction in describing “progressive coordination” (Simon, Kara,
Placa, & Avitzur, this issue), by which sequences of actions become more and more interiorized, condensed, or reified (cf., Dubinsky,
1991; Sfard, 1991). Note that the progressive coordination construct appears in the theoretical framework article but not in any of the
empirical articles, perhaps because it is assumed to be subsumed by reflective abstraction. What is missing from progressive co-
ordination (in reflective abstraction) is a description of how actions/operations are coordinated with one another.
In Piaget’s (1970a, 1970b) epistemology, logico-mathematical operations are defined by their reversibility and composibility. If
operations are the building blocks of mathematical concepts, their composibility and reversibility are the building blocks of logical
necessity. Piaget used reflective abstraction to explain how logico-mathematical operations become coordinated with one another
within reversible and composible systems. A reflective abstraction begins when a student takes actions/operations at one level and
acts upon them as objects. The reflective abstraction is complete when those new actions become coordinated as operations within a
reversible and composible system at a higher level. In other words, reflective abstraction requires a complete reorganization of all
related operations. Thus, it requires a prolonged period of time and does not occur in the context of any particular teaching episode.
In contrast, generalizing assimilations and functional accommodations often occur within a teaching episode, and they are easier
to engender. Both involve modification to existing schemes, so they constitute conceptual learning, but they do not require a
modification to the group structure of the operations contained within those schemes. For example, Olive and Vomvoridi (2006)
engendered a functional accommodation of a student’s part-whole scheme by engaging the student in tasks that elicited his available
iterating operation. The student, Tim, began to iterate unit fractional parts to determine their size in relation with the whole. The
functional accommodation involved the inclusion of iterating within the operations of Tim’s existing part-whole scheme, but it did
not require that the iterating operation be reorganized within a new group structure of operations.
When attempting to engender a reflective abstraction, the best that a teacher-researcher can hope for is to engage the student in
tasks that involve new sequences of existing operations. To the teacher-researcher it might appear as though the student visits a
higher level of operation but “folds back” to his prior way of operating during subsequent tasks (Martin, 2008; Pirie & Kieren, 1992).
The goal is to engender repeated visits to that higher level so that the student gains more and more experience in acting on existing
operations in new ways, creating more and more coordinations between those new actions until they become organized within a
complete structure. Because actions are the material of reflective abstraction and because reflective abstraction always requires new
actions be formed at a higher level, without multiple experiences of acting on existing operations, there is no basis for constructing a
new group structure. On the other hand, the group structure is closed (compositions of its elements—operations—produce only
operations already in the structure), so its completion will occur all at once, outside the context of any one experience.
Consider the case of a first-grade student named Tyrone. Steffe (1991) had been working with Tyrone in a teaching experiment
throughout the fall of 1980. Tyrone began the teaching experiment as a counter of figurative unit items; he didn’t need to see the
items he was counting but had to imagine spatial locations for each count. He had not yet constructed an initial number sequence
made up of abstract units and therefore could not count on. For example, given two collections of covered items, one with eight items
and one with three items, and asked to find the total number of items, Tyrone counted to 8 while pointing to the first cover eight
times and then continued counting three more times while pointing to the second cover. He could accomplish his continued count, to
11, by imagining a figurative pattern of 3 on the second cover. This way of operating was perturbed when Steffe changed the numbers
to 7 and 5, because Tyrone did not have a figurative pattern for 5. Instead, Tyrone began to monitor his counting acts while looking
away from the cover. As such, he was acting on his actions and operating at a new level. At least for the moment, 5 was at a higher
level than the rest of Tyrone’s counting sequence. Repeated visits like this seemed to induce a reorganization of Tyrone’s entire
number sequence—something that could not happen in the context of solving any particular task. After all, number sequences include
a potential infinitude of numbers and operations on those numbers. Like groups, they form a closed system and require a total
reorganization at the higher level.
On the other hand, there are plenty of opportunities for students to construct new knowledge at a given level. With regard to
stages of units coordination, we find students like Tim (a Stage 2 student) who constructed a measurement scheme for unit fractions
by accommodating his part-whole scheme (Olive & Vomvoridi, 2006). Thus, the claim that “mathematical concepts are always the
result of reflective abstraction” (Simon, Kara, Placa, & Avitzur, this issue, p. 5) does not seem warranted. Rather, there are two kinds
of conceptual development within mathematics: (1) those that involve reorganizations of schemes (e.g., functional accommodations
and generalizing assimilations) and (2) those that involve reorganizations of groups—coordinating operations within reversible and
composible systems at a higher level. Only the former involves reflective abstraction as characterized here.

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3. The case of multiplying fractions

Theoretical considerations notwithstanding, the most important test of a framework for learning is a test of utility in constructing
models that explain and predict students’ mathematical development. In this section, we will compare LTA to scheme theory with
regard to explaining and predicting students’ conceptual development in the context of multiplying fractions. What aspects of
learning does each framework explain? What predictive power does each framework provide in building models useful for teaching
(e.g., designing tasks likely to promote students’ schemes/concepts for multiplying fractions)?

3.1. Scheme theory

Hackenberg and Tillema (2009) report on a teaching experiment that they conducted with pairs of sixth-grade students. Here, we
focus on one pair: Sara and Amber. Neither student had constructed a scheme for multiplying unit fractions (a unit fractional com-
position scheme), but Amber had a recursive partitioning operation available. Recursive partitioning involves “partitioning a partition
in service of a non-partitioning goal” (p. 4). Hackenberg and Tillema intentionally engendered Amber’s construction of a unit
fractional composition scheme on the basis of her recursive partitioning operation and her whole number multiplication scheme.
During separate teaching episodes within the teaching experiment, Hackenberg and Tillema (2009) posed the Cake Problem to
Sara and Amber, as they worked on their own. The students had each partitioned a virtual cake into fifteen equal parts and pulled out
one part. Then the teacher-researcher asked the following question: “You decide to share that cake between two people; how much of
the cake would one person get?” (p. 7). Both students responded that they would get half of one fifteenth, but neither student could
name the result as a single fraction (although Amber seemed to consider it without prompting). Each student was prompted to use the
piece (half of one fifteenth) to figure it out. Whereas Sara attempted to fit the piece into the whole cake without considering the 15
parts, Amber fit the piece into a one-fifteenth part and, without going further, determined that it would fit into the whole 30 times,
“because two pieces can fit into one-fifteenth and there’s fifteen pieces in the whole cake” (p. 9).
Hackenberg and Tillema (2009) describe a functional accommodation to Amber’s measurement scheme for unit fractions: “Once
she used her mini-part to measure the first fifteenth, she seemed to imagine that she could insert two units into each of the 15 units”
(p. 9). The functional accommodation involved the use of recursive partitioning, transforming her measurement scheme for unit
fractions into a unit fractional composition scheme. This accommodation seemed to be triggered by the activity of measuring one part
with a part of that part. Sara performed a similar activity but did not construct a unit fractional composition scheme—a constraint
that Hackenberg and Tillema attributed to her lack of a recursive partitioning operation.
The researchers pushed ahead with Amber, attempting to engender a general fraction composition scheme for multiplying non-unit
fractions. For example, the teacher-researcher asked Amber to make 2/5 of 1/3 of a cake and determine its fractional size relation
with the whole cake. Amber seemed to assimilate such tasks within her unit fractional composition scheme, partitioning the whole
into three parts, then partitioning one of those parts into five parts, knowing that each of the new parts would be one fifteenth taking
out two pieces and naming them two fifteenths. However, taking 1/3 of 2/5 was much more challenging for Amber because she did
not treat two-fifths as a unit of two one-fifths that should be thirded. Ultimately, the researchers determined that the general fraction
composition scheme was not in Amber’s zone of potential construction.

3.2. LTA

Simon’s team conducted their own teaching experiment on fraction multiplication, with a fifth-grade student named Kylie. Two
articles in this special issue report on results from that teaching experiment. The first article (Simon, Kara, Norton, & Placa, this issue)
reports on the researchers’ attempts to promote a unifying meaning for multiplication (for whole numbers, mixed numbers, and
fractions). The second article (Simon, Kara, & Placa, this issue) reports on the design of tasks intended to promote meaningful use of
the algorithm for multiplying fractions.
Like Amber, Kylie had constructed recursive partitioning, but the researchers defined recursive partitioning differently than
Hackenberg and Tillema (2009). In line with LTA, Simon’s team defined the construct as “anticipating the result of taking a unit
fraction of a unit fraction” (Simon, Kara, Norton, & Placa, this issue). This definition would render Amber’s functional accom-
modation void: as an operation, recursive partitioning can be applied within various schemes; as a fractions concept, recursive
partitioning is equivalent to the unit fractional composition scheme that Amber constructed. Also like Amber, Kylie made limited
progress in generalizing her concept for multiplying fractions (and whole numbers).
As reported in the two articles, respectively, Kylie generalized her meaning for multiplication to mixed numbers and reinvented
the algorithm for multiplying fractions. However, the researchers experienced a persistent obstacle in Kylie’s treatment of the
multiplicand (the fraction being multiplied). It appears similar to the obstacle Hackenberg and Tillema (2009) experienced with
Amber: when operating on a non-unit fraction of a whole, the result loses its relationship to the whole. In this way, both students
seemed to be constrained by their stages of units coordination: they could not maintain the three levels of units required to operate on
a non-unit fraction as “a number in its own right” (Hackenberg, 2007). Each student demonstrated substantial learning about fraction
multiplication, but neither student experienced the reflective abstraction required to reorganize her operations on units at another
level.

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3.3. Summary

Both teaching experiments began with the goal of supporting students’ constructions of fractions multiplication concepts/
schemes, but they began from different directions. Hackenberg and Tillema (2009) began by considering the potential power of the
students’ available operations (e.g., recursive partitioning) in constructing new schemes, as hypothesized by a ZPC. The researchers
then designed tasks to engender the construction of those schemes. Simon’s team began by considering an objective (e.g., under-
standing the fraction multiplication algorithm) and positioning the student’s available concepts relative to that objective (Simon,
Kara, Norton, & Placa, this issue; Simon, Kara, & Placa, this issue). Then, they engineered a sequence of tasks that would connect the
student’s available concepts to the objective through a corresponding sequence of activity. As such, LTA explained the utility of the
entire task sequence in meaningfully teaching the algorithm for multiplying fractions. On the other hand, LTA did not help the
researchers predict the constraint that they experienced with regard to Kylie’s treatment of the multiplicand. In contrast, Hackenberg
and Tillema (2009) did predict the constraint, but they only considered Amber’s progress one new scheme at a time.

4. Conclusions

LTA and scheme theory frameworks both draw upon Piagetian constructs to build models for teaching and learning mathematics.
This commentary used Piaget’s meta-framework for mathematical development to compare LTA and scheme theory, including the
models they build. Here, we reconsider the three questions raised at the introduction, especially in the context of fractions multi-
plication. First, how does LTA support models for teaching and learning fractions multiplication?
LTA relies on a goal-action construct—similar to Piaget’s scheme—to explain how concepts are formed (Simon, Kara, Placa, &
Avitzur, this issue). The goal-action construct describes how students’ available actions (physical or mental) are inherently tied to
goals. In this framework, concepts are formed by chaining together sequences of actions, each tied to a sub-goal, to achieve a new
goal. This leads to a new (goal-action) concept as students learn to anticipate the results of their activity, though progressive co-
ordination of the sequence of actions.
In the case of fractions multiplication, Simon’s team demonstrated how a teacher-researcher could use the LTA framework to
support student construction of a new concept (Simon, Kara, & Placa, this issue). Namely, the goal-action construct was used to posit
a sequence of actions that connected the student’s available concept of fraction as measure to a concept for fraction multiplication,
and the teacher-researcher designed a sequence of tasks that would elicit the corresponding sequence of actions. Thus, the researchers
found that “reinvention of the multiplication-of-fractions algorithm can be promoted” (Simon, Kara, & Placa, this issue). In doing so,
the researchers explained the teaching/learning process as a sequence of elicited activity and even predicted some of the ways
students might form the new concept through that activity.
We now turn to the second question: how does the explanatory and predictive power of LTA’s models compare to those of scheme
theory? Although the LTA framework can be used to predict productive student activity in response to theory-driven tasks, it did not
predict the operational constraint that Kylie experienced with regard to referent units (Simon, Kara, Norton, & Placa, this issue).
Instead, the researchers relied on units coordination as a post-hoc explanation for why Kylie lost track of the referent for the
multiplicand in fraction multiplication. Using scheme theory, which includes an account for stages of units coordination, Hackenberg
and Tillema (2009) did predict similar constraints in Sara and Amber’s ways of operating. The difference seems to lie in the dis-
tinction between actions in LTA’s goal-action construct and operations in the operational scheme construct. Yet, neither LTA nor the
scheme theory framework describe a structure for coordinating actions as (interiorized) operations. We consider this problem in
addressing the final question: what theoretical problems does LTA solve and what new problems arise?
To explain mathematical development, Piaget (1970a, 1970b) relied on two kinds of cognitive structures. The first kind of
structure, schemes, resembles the goal-action structure in LTA’s characterization of concepts. The second kind of structure, groups, is
unique to mathematics. Whereas functional accommodations and generalizing assimilations apply to schemes, reflective abstraction
applies to groups: “Reflective abstraction always consists in the introduction of new co-ordinations into what is derived from earlier
forms—which is already a variety of operations on operations” (Piaget, 1972, p. 71). Thus, when a reflective abstraction occurs, the
student becomes a more powerful mathematician in general—beyond any particular scheme or domain of mathematics. Steffe’s
(2002) reorganization hypothesis captures this idea, explaining how stages of units coordination introduce operational affordances
and constraints that cross fractions knowledge and multiplicative reasoning with whole numbers, for example. However, the hy-
pothesis does not specify the ways that units coordination operations are coordinated with one another apart from particular
schemes.
The group structure does describe ways that operations are organized, thus explaining logical necessity in students’ ways of
operating (i.e., logico-mathematical operations). Norton and Wilkins (2012) provided “the splitting group” as an example. In that
example, partitioning and iterating are described as basic operations, already derived from coordinations of mental actions, as
described by Piaget (e.g., Piaget, Inhelder, & Szeminska, 1960). The two operations act as inverses of each other in that they can undo
each other as previously described. As students attend to additional levels of units, the situation becomes more complicated because
partitioning a whole into m parts and then iterating one of those parts n times does not reproduce the whole unless m = n. Still, the
logical necessity for operating with partitioning and iterating depends upon the reversibility and composibility of the operations, as
well as the closure of the group. Every possible combination of the operations is accounted for by the group structure, and “because
every operation is reversible, an ‘erroneous result’ is simply not an element of the system” (Piaget, 1970b, p. 15).
Although scheme theory and LTA describe processes of progressive coordination or interiorization by which sequences of actions
condense into a single action/operation, neither theory accounts for the logical necessity of logico-mathematical operations.

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Interiorization and progressive coordination are both closely tied to reflective abstraction, but neither process introduces a structure
for organizing the actions/operations among one another.
Reflective abstraction is notoriously difficult to explain. As Chomsky declared during a debate with Piaget, “My uneasiness with
reflective abstraction is … that I do not know what the phrase means, to what processes it refers, or what are its principles” (Piattelli-
Palmarini, 1980, p. 323). Indeed, several mathematics education researchers have attempted to clarify the process by elaborating on
it (e.g., Simon et al., 2004; von Glasersfeld, 2000). This commentary illustrates the challenge by contrasting LTA’s characterization of
the construct with a stricter interpretation, involving the group structure.
In addition to its expansion on reflective abstraction, this commentary has focused on comparing models relying on the LTA
framework with those relying on scheme theory. However, there are additional Piagetian frameworks with which LTA might
compare: the reflection on activity-effect relations framework, which is the focus of Tzur’s commentary (this issue); and the APOS
framework mentioned in Simon, Kara, Norton, and Placa (this issue).
Like LTA’s progressive coordination, APOS describes a process by which actions (A) become condensed into processes (P) and
then objects (O) that the student can act upon (Dubinsky, 1991). And like schemas (S) in APOS, LTA describes ways that the
“coordination of concepts can explain building more advanced knowledge from existing concepts.” The APOS framework, too, at-
tempts to explain and operationalize reflective abstraction, particularly for the teaching and learning of advanced mathematics.
Whichever framework we, as researchers, adopt, there will be affordances and constraints to both the underlying theory and the
explanatory/predictive power that its models produce, and it is the explanatory/predictive power of our models that advances
mathematics education as a scientific field.

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