Session Information
24 SES 03, Math for All: Evidence-Based Learning for the 21st Century
Symposium
Contribution
Interactive Groups (IG) (Valls & Kyriakides, 2013) are small groups of students within the classroom, organized heterogeneously (in terms of ability, gender, race, etc.). The main aim of IGs is to develop students’ learning drawing on everyone’s voice within the group. Each group has five or six students and a volunteer who facilitates the interaction. The teacher designs the lesson and s/he provides the task to the volunteer, with a brief guidance. Then, the facilitator (volunteer) joins the small group of students (IG) for around 15-20 minutes encouraging all the students within the group to participate in the activity. After that, s/he moves towards the next IG, and the activity starts again. Four different IGs are working at the same time. The class ends when all students have completed all the activities designed by the teacher. In this paper, we discuss video-recorded data collected within a Catalan research project funded by the Recercaixa Foundation. The aim of this project is to study what are the elements of success (in terms of mathematics achievement) within IGs when using tablets as educational tools. We collected data during two school years (2014-2015 and 2015-2016), in three different settings (1 kindergarten, 1 elementary and 1 secondary school), in Catalonia and Euskadi (Spain). Data was also triangulated with teachers and volunteers’ in-depth interviews and classrooms observations. In order to analyse the data collection, we used the communicative methodology (Gómez, Puigvert & Flecha, 2011). In this paper, we discuss whether using tablets encouraged (or not) students to focus on a deep mathematical understanding of the tasks, rather than just doing mechanically the calculations. For the discussion, we select the case of a particular activity about planning a trip. Students (11-12 years old) have to plan the trip, calculate the cost, choose among different travel opportunities, visit different monuments, planning how much money they need to save for the trip, etc. The task is available on-line. All the students used a tablet in order to have access to the problem, and to provide their answers. We conclude that tablets have the potential to motivate students to focus on the task. The tablet allows students to focus on the strategies to solve the task, hence the main focus become students’ interactions. The most effective interactions are the ones in which the children justify (mathematically) their claims. The facilitator just encourages children to do so.
References
Gómez, A., Puigvert, L., & Flecha, R. (2011). Critical communicative methodology: Informing real social transformation through research. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(3), 235-245. Valls, R., & Kyriakides, L. (2013). The power of Interactive Groups: how diversity of adults volunteering in classroom groups can promote inclusion and success for children of vulnerable minority ethnic populations. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(1), 17-33.
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