Session Information
24 SES 06, Utilising Student Collaborative Problem Solving in Mathematics to Study the Social Essentials of Learning
Symposium
Contribution
In this international collaborative project, researchers from Australia, Finland, and Spain have undertaken parallel, complementary analyses of a shared dataset to identify and explain what we have called, “the social essentials of learning.” The research design created situations requiring individual, dyadic, and small group (4-6 students) problem solving in mathematics and documented the social interactions and associated learning in order to identify the social essentials of the learning process. The contributory analyses, utilising expertise specific to the participating international researchers, address the connection between product and process, and the contribution of affect and types of dialogic talk to an understanding of collaborative problem solving and learning. This research addresses theoretical issues at the heart of international attempts to model learning as a socially mediated process.
In recent years researchers have paid attention to the role of social interaction and dialogic talk in the learning of mathematics (Bakker, Smit, & Wegerif, 2015). This interest emerges from the fact that language mediates any episode of learning. To learn any concept, human beings use language as a tool to define, specify, analyse, assess, appreciate, speculate, inquire, and to solve any problem. Vygotsky (1978) asserted that language-based social interaction has a positive impact on children’s individual cognitive development. According to Mercer and Sams (2006), improving the quality of children’s use of language for reasoning would enhance their individual learning and understanding of mathematics (p. 525). However, more research is needed to interpret the word “quality” in Mercer and Sams’ claim. What type of talk is more likely to produce opportunities for encouraging children’ mathematics learning? And such talk is accompanied by supporting communicative devices such as gestures and diagrams, all functioning to sustain social interaction in contexts of collaborative problem solving.
The availability of a laboratory classroom equipped with 10 built-in video cameras and up to 32 audio channels provided the international research team with the capacity to control and document instructional stimuli and to analyse the student learning responses for every student in the class at a level of detail not previously possible in authentic classroom settings. In this symposium, we present three parallel analyses undertaken by researchers in Australia, Spain, and Finland respectively. Each analysis draws on the established research expertise of classroom research communities in these three countries.
Three research questions are addressed in this symposium:
- What are the foci of the students’ social interactions during collaborative problem solving (Paper 1)
- How does students’ capacity to function successfully in the affective dimension open up or close down opportunities for mathematics learning within group-based mathematics problem solving? (Paper 2)
- What forms of interactive speech can be associated with successful learning trajectories from the analysis of episodes of interaction in small group mathematical problem solving? (Paper 3)
The symposium is intended to situate the project theoretically and methodologically and to report three distinct analytical approaches and their consequences in order to catalyse useful discussion concerning those aspects of the learning process that are fundamentally and essentially social. The first presentation (Paper 1) sets out an analytical approach that examines the foci of student-student interaction during collaborative problem solving. The second presentation (Paper 2) examines the importance of affective micro-culture in facilitating or inhibiting collaborative problem solving. Presentation 3 (Paper 3) investigates the connection between dialogic talk and effective student problem solving and associated learning.
It is anticipated that the combination of perspectives presented from this international collaborative project will stimulate lively discussion of their interrelationship and the contribution that they make collectively to our understanding (and optimisation) of student collaborative mathematical problem solving and learning.
References
Bakker, A., Smit, J., & Wegerif, R. (2015). Scaffolding and dialogic teaching in mathematics education: introduction and review. ZDM, 47(7), 1047-1065. Mercer, N., & Sams, C. (2006). Teaching children how to use language to solve maths problems. Language and Education, 20(6), 507-528. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
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