Learning research in a laboratory classroom : a reflection on complementarity and commensurability among multiple analytical accounts

With the myriad theories generated through research over the years, a continuing challenge for researchers is to navigate the multitude of theories in order to communicate their research, integrate empirical results, and make progress as a field by building upon empirical research. The Social Unit of Learning project was purposefully designed so that researchers from multiple disciplines with different theoretical perspectives could work together to examine the complexity of the mathematics classroom. In this paper, we reflect on the multiple analytical accounts generated from the project, drawing from the notions of complementarity and commensurability. Two parallel analyses, applying the …