next day thoughts after meeting: structural relevance, also constructed

ch2.tex

@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ This organization of the data yields clues, namely critical factors, that can be
 Phenomenography, a research orientation created and developed by Ference Marton and colleagues\cite{svensson1997theoretical}, has as its purpose the discovery and elucidation of categories of conceptions, mainly in the context of education.
 For raw data, researchers work with interview transcripts and other verbal productions by learners, extracting text fragments conveying meaning, and exploring possible categorizations of these excerpts.
 The categories are about the meaning an object of learning has to an individual.
-(Incidently, as the categories are not of people, but of meanings, a person's multiple meanings attached to a given learning object, may occupy multiple categories.)
+(Incidentally, as the categories are not of people, but of meanings, a person's multiple meanings attached to a given learning object, may occupy multiple categories.)
 It is important that the descriptions of these categories make the categories comparable.
 Once the categories are established, comparison is used to determine relationships between pairs of them. Usually, between three to eight categories are created(\cite{Lister}?),
 though there are certainly occasions when a categorization with greater cardinality is very useful (see for example the work of Harel and Sowder\cite{harel1998students}).
@@ -81,6 +81,11 @@ Because categories are often related such that one reflects deeper understanding
 
 
 Phenomenography, and its extension variation theory, are appropriate mental constructs for comprehending student conceptualizations about proof in computer science, because the subject is the understandings, including those obtained after reflection, of proof present in the student population. These understandings have been seen to vary in completeness and in depth. Comparison of categorizations has suggested items to clarify for students, and students have responded positively to these suggested ideas.
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+Marton and Booth\cite{marton1997learning} extended phenomenography and variation theory to include the idea of structural relevance. Using this idea, we can hope to help students discern an aspect of a learning objective, by pointing out a connection between this relatively new aspect and a pre-existing notion that provides, for example, motivation to take note of this aspect. With proofs we may bring to students' attention that these will be used in future course work to understand algorithm's properties, such as computational complexity.
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+By attending to the construction of structural relevance as well as to the construction of the curriculum's learning objectives, we can provide help to students, in the form of motivation.
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 %Social constructivism is used because of the nature of proof as a communication. Interaction between people composing and understanding a proof helps people learn how to compose and how to understand proofs.