Lave, Murtaugh, de la Rocha

“The dialectic of arithmetic in grocery shopping”

Theme of the reading

This chapter reports work done by Jean Lave and her colleagues in the Adult Mathematics Project conducted at UC Irvine in the early 1980s. The authors go hunting for arithmetic activity in the wilds of American supermarkets. What sorts of arithmetic do just plain folks (JPFs) do? Under what conditions do they do it. Before describing the answers they found, the authors set the stage by discussing previous efforts to document and understand the nature of real-world activity. They introduce the concepts of arena, setting and activity, and describe the relations among these concepts. They then report the actual behavior of shoppers as they proceed through the supermarket.

Getting ready to read

What does “ubiquity” mean?

Questions to keep in mind while reading

What methods did Lave et al. use to document the behavior of shoppers?

How does the notion of the dialectic between setting and activity contribute to their analysis?

Shoppers report that shopping is routine activity. How do the authors handle this item of data on shopper attitudes?

What role does unit price arithmetic play in shoppers’ decisions while selecting items?

What does gap-closing problem solving refer to? How is that different from other kinds of problem solving studied in cognitive science?

How do the authors explain the astonishing level of success in arithmetic computations observed among shoppers?