Analogies and Mathematics: What is the Connection? Book review of Mathematical and Analogical Reasoning of Young Learners

Lyn English (Ed). Mathematical and Analogical Reasoning of Young Learners. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, 2004. ISBN 0-8058-4945-9. In the last decade and a half mathematics education literature has shown a rapid increase in books and articles that focus on the social and cultural issues related to mathematics learning and teaching. Although the social and cultural dimensions are important and relevant, the cognitive dimension of mathematical learning is equally important and received less attention. Mathematical and Analogical Reasoning of Young Learners takes us back to the very roots of learning and investigates foundational questions on the nature of and the evolution of reasoning in young children. The book also partially addresses cross-cultural themes in that it reports the results of a 3-year longitudinal study whose participants were children in Australia and the United States. This naturally leads to the question of the variance or the invariance of the findings across these two cultures, and an explanation for the nature of the similarity or dissimilarity in reasoning patterns