It is important to note that in this pedagogical approach, almost all of the programs are written by the students. One hypothesis that the research investigates is that, whether completely successful or not, the task of writing appropriate code leads students to make the mental constructions of actions, processes, objects, and schemas proposed by the theory. The computer work is accompanied by classroom discussions that give the students an opportunity to reflect on what they have done in the computer lab and relate them to mathematical concepts and their properties and relationships. Once the concepts are in place in their minds, the students are assigned (in class, homework and examinations) many standard exercises and problems related to cosets.
After the students have been through such an instructional treatment, quantitative and qualitative instruments are designed to determine the mental concepts they may have constructed and the mathematics they may have learned. The theoretical analysis points to questions researchers may ask in the process of data analysis and the results of this data analysis indicates both the extent to which the instruction has been effective and possible revisions in the genetic decomposition.
This way of doing research and curriculum development simultaneously emphasizes both theory and applications to teaching practice.