Assimilation or accommodation?

Identify some learning points from your teaching, and classify the type of learning required in each case as ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’ or
‘difficult to tell’.

To help you with this task, we have provided two examples of the way one might approach this activity in two very different disciplines:
mathematics and economics.

Learning point Assimilation, accommodation, or Strategy to facilitate Student learning activity

difficult to tell?

Differentiation in If students have previously just
mathematics - in studied four-function arithmetic
maths, (+-/x), then differentiation is
differentiation is all something else again. It is a different
about the rate of kind of mathematics, or perhaps the
change of one point at which arithmetic broadens
variable with respect out into mathematics. Students will
to another variable have to accommodate their view of
and comes with a what maths is, what maths can do, to
detailed and embrace differentiation. (By contrast,
complex set of once they can do differentiation,
mathematical learning integration – which is a
approaches and concept very much linked to
methods differentiation will probably be a
much smaller, assimilative task.)
You can teach differentiation as a
group of rules, formulae and
techniques. But I wouldn't
recommend it. If you do, students
may become technically proficient,
but differentiation probably won't
make much sense to them.
You could get your students to
discover the concept of
differentiation for themselves,
through a carefully sequenced
structure tasks.
Students will consider the motion of a
body in one dimension, and explore
relationships between distance, time
and velocity. The use of graphs can
help. A key question for them to
answer is ‘how fast is it going now?’
Once they get that, then the idea of
differentiation as a kind of repeated
instantaneous simple division will be
much easier for them to learn, and
they will see the point of
differentiation.

The nature of It depends. This learning could be facilitated by Students would probably quickly work
oligopoly in giving them brief unlabelled out that one was a free market and
economics If the learners can already decide and descriptions of a (real) monopoly, an another was a monopoly. Students
give a reasoned explanation of oligopoly and a free market, and might have more trouble with
 whether a particular economic setting asking them to describe the oligopoly, but hopefully would see
is a monopoly or a free market, then difference between these three that it lies between the other two. If
they already have a higher-level forms of economic organisation. you led them by making the third
concept of ‘forms of economic example one from contemporary
organisation’. For these learners, Russia, one or more of the students
oligopoly will assimilate neatly into would probably arrive at the word
their model, somewhere between oligopoly.
free-market and monopoly. This will
be easy, as long as they can accept
fuzzy boundaries.

If students haven't previously studied

both free markets and monopolies,
then they will have to come to terms
with the meta-concept of ‘forms of
economic organisation’ to make sense
of oligopoly and the adjacent
concepts of free market and
monopoly.

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