There are problems with coordinating multiple basic concepts even at the end of a college statistics class (Study 1), but teachers' iconic gesture can help students coordinate concepts (Study 2).
For example, in connection with (1), Schleiermacher develops certain principles concerning how to form concepts correctly rather than incorrectly (i.e. in such a way that -- to borrow a more recent idiom -- they, their superordinate genus-concepts, their subordinate species-concepts, and their contrasting coordinate concepts "carve nature at the joints").
Second, if understanding of complex concepts requires dynamically coordinating multiple concepts for each new situation, it is a resource-intensive activity, cognitively speaking, and thus subject to the limitations of working memory.
Some instructors might be surprised that students are not coordinating these concepts.
In this paper, we examine whether gesture can be used (and is being used) to help students with the difficult task of coordinating statistical concepts.
If concepts are situated and simulation-based, understanding should be measured by examining students' ability to dynamically coordinate the concepts for the purpose at hand, which is the starting point for the current article.
With this assessment in hand, we then explore whether gesture might be one way of facilitating students' ability to coordinate two concepts (mean and standard deviation) that must be considered simultaneously in evaluating a distribution.
An embodied cognition interpretation of this finding might emphasize that these children are attempting to activate and dynamically coordinate their concepts of height and width for this situation, using gesture to offload some of this cognitive work.
Within Sliding Mode Control (SMC) framework and based on relative degree and local diffeomorphic coordinate transformation concepts, OLSM controllers that feature short finite time convergence, heavy modeling uncertainties robustness, and chattering extinction and suppression are designed.
