Conceptual knowledge OR Procedural knowledge OR Conceptual knowledge AND Procedural knowledge:Why the conjunction is important for teachers

Hurrell · Australian Journal of Teacher Education · 2021 · education · 10.14221/ajte.2021v46n2.4 · record hurrell2021-conceptual-knowledge-or-procedural
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (pdftext); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. Claim relations left empty deliberately: the paper discusses named prior work at length (Star 2005; Baroody, Feil & Johnson 2007; Rittle-Johnson & Schneider 2015; Kieran 2013), but every explicit relation stated is between those prior works and each other (e.g. Baroody et al. reconceptualising Star's matrix), not between this paper and them; the paper never says it extends, contradicts or replicates a named study, so inferring a relation from its citations would breach rule 7. Claim type is 'critique' because the shape of the contribution is the case against a position (that the two knowledge types are mutually exclusive, and that conceptual knowledge is always the deeper one), argued from literature rather than from new data; there is no new empirical result. No opening/closing limitations section exists - the two quoted hedges are the only places the paper qualifies its own evidence base, and the second one spans a paragraph break in the extracted text, so its verbatim form contains a blank line. 2026-08-14 and 2026-08-15 schema-0.3 passes: every quote verified as an exact substring of the staged text and anchored at merge time; concept terms verified present; every edge endpoint an existing node.
1 quote on this page breaks a word across a line. The PDF this text was extracted from hyphenated a word at the end of a printed line — adversar- ial, repre- sentations — and the extractor kept the hyphen and the space. The quotes keep them because a quote is reproduced exactly or it proves nothing: the break is the typesetter’s, not the author’s. A search of this page will not find the affected words.
This record’s own method is review, and the tags below follow from that. A review’s findings, quantities and statistics are things stated IN this paper, and some of them report results obtained elsewhere. No tag on this page names a different author. Measured across every review in this corpus, 81% of a review’s tags carry no citation at all — most of them are the review speaking. The corpus does not adjudicate the rest: read an unmarked tag as a claim this paper makes, not necessarily one it made first.
How to read this page. The article itself is not reproduced here — this paper is not cleared for redistribution, so what follows is the tag layer alone. The evidence sentences are withheld with the article. The table at the foot lists every tag the record carries; each row names the facet it belongs to, and the whose words column says whether the tag records the paper's own wording or the tagger's sentence about the paper. Every tag links to each other paper in the corpus carrying it. The machine-readable edition of the same thing is the TEI file beside this one, where the tags live in standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.
Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
concept 9 fields

Tags on this paper

Every tag the record carries, each linking to every other paper in the corpus that carries it. A tag appears here whether or not its words occur in the article — the spans below are only the ones a sentence in this paper licenses. Of the 10 concept tags on this paper, all 10 are grounded in a quoted sentence.
conceptual knowledge procedural knowledge concept Relational Knowledge routine expertise adaptive expertise CRA CPA Declarative Instrumental once procedures have been memorised and practised without understanding, students lose the motivation to look for their meaning, which is why a procedure-first sequence blocks the conceptual half of the iteration acquiring procedural knowledge reduces the load on working memory, and the freed capacity can then be spent on building conceptual knowledge a powerful earlier understanding (e.g. reading the equals sign as 'give me an answer') obtrudes into later learning and obfuscates the teaching that follows procedure cognitive interference attitudinal interference iterative view review

Legend

relation to other workclaim_relationshow this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies
claim typeclaim_typethe shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null
concept edgeconcept_edgesan asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it
conceptconceptsan idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it
content tagcontent_tagsa finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper
limitationlimitationswhat the paper says its evidence cannot support
mechanismmechanismshow the reported effect is said to come about
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it
unrecordable relationunhoused_relationsa relation the paper asserts that this vocabulary cannot express, with the reason

The paper

The full text is not reproduced here. This article is not cleared for redistribution, so the page carries the tag layer only. Its evidence sentences are withheld; the grounding status remains with each tag, and the article itself is at https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2021v46n2.4. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 1 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 5 · concepts 10 · content_tags 19 · limitations 5 · mechanisms 3 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 6 · unhoused_relations 2

Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; none of 5 relations here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

This record holds no controls. A layer is empty when the tagger recorded nothing in it — which is not the same as the paper having nothing to record.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typecritique
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claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonconceptual and procedural knowledge in mathematics teaching
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phenomenonthe paper's words
methodreview
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also in: review
methodthe paper's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[0]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[1]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
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mechanisms[2]the tagger's words
limitationsThe paper's claim that misunderstanding of the two knowledge forms is widespread among teachers rests on anecdote rather than on collected data.
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limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsThe paper concedes that the concept-first iterative approach it endorses has little empirical evidence behind it.
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limitations[1]the tagger's words
limitationsThe dichotomy the paper's title turns on is reported as having been declared fundamentally unsound, on the ground that procedures are conceptual in nature.
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what this limits: the conceptual/procedural split as a sound partition: the paper reports Kieran declaring the dichotomy fundamentally unsound because procedures are conceptual during elaboration
limitations[2]1.0the tagger's words
limitationsTreating the two knowledge forms as two ends of a continuum is called false; the paper holds that either can occupy different positions depending on the situation.
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what this limits: a placement of a task or a learner at one end of the conceptual/procedural continuum: the paper calls that positioning false, since either can occupy different places depending on the situation
limitations[3]1.0the tagger's words
limitationsTwo cells of Star's own matrix have no worked exemplars - the paper reports that deep-procedural and shallow-conceptual knowledge are hard even to illustrate.
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limitations[4]0.9the tagger's words
conceptsconceptual knowledge
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concepts[0]the paper's words
conceptsprocedural knowledge
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concepts[1]the paper's words
conceptsconcept
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also in: concept
concepts[2]the paper's words
conceptsRelational Knowledge
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concepts[3]0.9the paper's words
conceptsroutine expertise
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concepts[4]0.9the paper's words
conceptsadaptive expertise
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concepts[5]0.9the paper's words
conceptsCRA
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also in: CRA
concepts[6]0.9the paper's words
conceptsCPA
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also in: CPA
concepts[7]0.9the paper's words
conceptsDeclarative
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also in: Declarative
concepts[8]0.85the paper's words
conceptsInstrumental
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also in: Instrumental
concepts[9]0.9the paper's words
unhoused_relationsconceptual knowledge → procedural knowledge
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THE DISTINCTION ITSELF IS DECLARED UNSOUND, and no type can say that. Kieran (2013) 'declared the dichotomy between them to be fundamentally unsound'. 'distinct-from' asserts the two ARE distinct; there is no way to record a cited author denying that the boundary can be drawn - the same gap quine1951 sits in.
unhoused_relations[0]0.9the tagger's words
unhoused_relationsprocedures → concepts
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THE CATEGORIES INTERPENETRATE RATHER THAN RELATE: 'Quotation withheld'. Not 'is-a', not 'part-of', not 'same-as' - a claim that membership is temporary and phase-dependent, which no edge type carries.
unhoused_relations[1]0.85the tagger's words
sensesconcept - a mental representation embodying the essential features of an object, situation or idea, whose function is to let phenomena be classified as belonging together or not
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senses[0]1.0the tagger's words
sensesprocedural knowledge - characterised by some researchers as the capacity to follow steps in sequence to reach a mathematical goal
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senses[1]1.0the tagger's words
sensesthe conceptual/procedural relation - bi-directional but NOT always symmetrical, with conceptual knowledge at times the stronger support
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senses[2]1.0the tagger's words
sensesconceptual/procedural - a single distinction carrying eight different name pairs across eight traditions (Skemp's instrumental/relational, Tulving's episodic/semantic, Anderson's procedural/declarative...), which the paper asserts are the same division
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senses[3]0.9the tagger's words
sensesdeep - in Star's matrix a property that BOTH knowledge types can have, not a property of conceptual knowledge alone
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senses[4]0.9the tagger's words
sensesadaptive expertise - both knowledge types deep AND applicable to unfamiliar situations; routine expertise is the same knowledge without the transfer
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senses[5]0.9the tagger's words
claim_relationscontradicts → the belief, held by the experienced teachers the author surveyed, that conceptual and procedural knowledge are mutually exclusive and that conceptual is always the more necessary
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note: The paper's target is a belief held by practitioners rather than a published claim, and it is quoted from the author's own observation of them.
claim_relations[0]0.9the tagger's words
concept_edgesconceptual knowledge —renamed-across-fields→ Relational Knowledge
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strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: An in-text renaming attributed to a named source: 'notably characterised by Skemp, 1978, as Relational…'.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesconceptual knowledge —renamed-across-fields→ Declarative
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strength of the relation: 0.8 · about this quote: PAGE FURNITURE IS SPLICED INTO THE 'evidence' QUOTE - the journal's page footer and a page number, between the sentence and Table 1: 'Vol 46, 2, February 2021 60 Australian Journal of Teacher…'. The words on either side of it were never continuous on the page; read the quote with it deleted. · note: TABLE 1 IS THIS PROJECT'S THESIS WITH A TABLE. Eight research traditions across 1976-1984 - Skemp, Piaget, Gelman & Gallistel, Resnick, Tulving, Anderson, Van Lehn, Baroody - each name the SAME two categories differently, and the paper says so outright: 'regardless of the labels, the divisions regarding the types…'. The claim of sameness is the paper's, not the tagger's.
concept_edges[1]0.85the tagger's words
concept_edgesprocedural knowledge —renamed-across-fields→ Instrumental
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
strength of the relation: 0.8 · about this quote: PAGE FURNITURE IS SPLICED INTO THE 'evidence' QUOTE - the journal's page footer and a page number, between the sentence and Table 1: 'Vol 46, 2, February 2021 60 Australian Journal of Teacher…'. The words on either side of it were never continuous on the page; read the quote with it deleted. · note: TABLE 1 IS THIS PROJECT'S THESIS WITH A TABLE. Eight research traditions across 1976-1984 - Skemp, Piaget, Gelman & Gallistel, Resnick, Tulving, Anderson, Van Lehn, Baroody - each name the SAME two categories differently, and the paper says so outright: 'regardless of the labels, the divisions regarding the types…'. The claim of sameness is the paper's, not the tagger's.
concept_edges[2]0.85the tagger's words
concept_edgesCRA —same-as→ CPA
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strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: 'also referred to as' - one instructional sequence, two acronyms live in the same literature.
also in: CRA · CPA
concept_edges[3]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesadaptive expertise —contrasted-with→ routine expertise
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differs in: whether the knowledge transfers to unfamiliar situations - routine expertise applies to familiar ones only · strength of the relation: 0.8
concept_edges[5]0.9the tagger's words
content_tagsExperienced primary and lower-secondary teachers believed that conceptual and procedural knowledge are mutually exclusive and that conceptual knowledge is always the more appropriate thing to teach.
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content_tags.findings[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsProcedural and conceptual knowledge both matter and each strengthens the other.
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content_tags.findings[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsEither procedural or conceptual knowledge can be shallow or deep.
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content_tags.findings[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsThe synthesis endorses teaching conceptual knowledge before procedural knowledge in most cases.
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content_tags.findings[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsStudents are likelier to develop conceptual knowledge if they begin with it and then move to procedural knowledge.
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content_tags.findings[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsThe empirical support for concept-first is that students taught conceptually and then procedurally outperform students taught procedurally and then conceptually.
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content_tags.findings[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsSequencing arithmetic problems to expose conceptual relationships was efficacious; in random order the effect was not seen.
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content_tags.findings[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsThe conceptual-procedural relationship is bi-directional but not always symmetrical: at times conceptual knowledge supports procedural knowledge more strongly than the reverse.
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content_tags.findings[7]the tagger's words
content_tagsThe paper's answer to its own title is that teachers need conceptual AND procedural knowledge, with the timing and placement left to the teacher's professional judgement.
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content_tags.findings[8]the tagger's words
content_tagsKieran (2013) declared the conceptual-procedural dichotomy fundamentally unsound.
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content_tags.findings[9]the tagger's words
content_tagsconcept
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also in: concept
content_tags.definitions[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsconceptual knowledge
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content_tags.definitions[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsprocedure
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also in: procedure
content_tags.definitions[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsprocedural knowledge
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content_tags.definitions[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsroutine expertise
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content_tags.definitions[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsadaptive expertise
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content_tags.definitions[5]the tagger's words
content_tagscognitive interference
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content_tags.definitions[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsattitudinal interference
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content_tags.definitions[7]the tagger's words
content_tagsiterative view
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content_tags.definitions[8]the tagger's words

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