Groupwork provides opportunities to learn important communication and collaboration skills, but how can we ensure all students are participating equitably while also engaging with the academic content when working in groups? Group-worthy tasks provide participation structures needed for students to engage with the content as well as develop and…

Math courses serve as cornerstones to most, if not all, community college programs. Yet, these courses continue to be gatekeepers. Contextualization represents a promising venue through which instructors might break down math barriers for students. This study explores community college students' learning experiences in contextualized math classes,…

Background: Groupwork is a desirable activity in mathematics classrooms for the opportunity it creates for collaborative reasoning and interdependence. Correlations between group-level processes and outcomes have helped characterize the features of more successful groups, but group-level constructs can obscure how students negotiate ideas. This…

One objective of mathematics learning is to solve problem and to communicate idea to get a solution. Human life is inseparable from social activity, including cooperation. Similarly, in mathematics learning sometimes students need friends to discuss with in solving mathematics problem. Cooperative learning model can be an alternative to bridge the…

This article describes an action research project designed to help students improve the quality of their small group discussions. Practical classroom advice is included.

In this paper the authors explored the question of collective understanding in online mathematics education settings and presented a brief overview of traditional methods for documenting norms and collective mathematical practices. A method for documenting collective development was proposed that builds on existing methods and frameworks yet is…

In this paper, we trace the development of our theorizing about students' mathematical understanding, showing how the adoption of an enactivist perspective has transformed our gaze in terms of the objects of our studies and occasioned for us new methods of data analysis. Drawing on elements of Pirie-Kieren (P-K) Theory for the Dynamical Growth of…

This paper describes the development of a Peer-Led Guided Inquiry (PLGI) program for teaching calculus at the University of South Florida. This approach uses the POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) teaching strategy and the small group learning model PLTL (Peer-Led Team Learning). The developed materials used a learning cycle based on…

This ethnographic study answers calls for research into the ways that virtual organizations (or innovation-driven collaborative teams) form and develop, what supports and constraints their development, and the leadership models that support the organizations' work. The study examines how a virtual organization emerged from an intersegmental…

Collaborative learning is being used extensively by educators at all levels. Peer-led team learning in a version of collaborative learning that has shown consistent success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. Using a multi-phase research study we describe the development of an observation instrument that can be used to…

Collaborative learning assumes that knowledge is constructed through negotiation and discussion. This exploratory study focuses on 2 groups of 3 pre-service primary teachers solving 2 mathematical tasks in a text-based and asynchronous WorkMates learning environment. This case study describes the group processes, and the different patterns of…

We conducted research within a program serving future mathematics and science teachers. Groups of teachers worked primarily online in an asynchronous discussion environment on a 6-week task in which they applied learning-science ideas acquired from an educational psychology course to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed an…

For many students, the experience of school mathematics is not a positive one. Processes of exclusion operate to disadvantage students along social class, race and gender lines. For students from backgrounds that are not part of the success regime, significant scaffolding by teachers is needed if they are to be successful. In this article, the…

Reports on a 3-year study of patterns of student-student social interaction that mediated metacognitive activity in senior secondary school mathematics classrooms. Unsuccessful problem solving was characterized by students' poor metacognitive decisions exacerbated by lack of critical engagement with each other's thinking while successful outcomes…

Discusses whether verbal interaction is recognized as the source from which co-operative groups draw their power to facilitate mathematical learning. Reflects on a group in a mathematics course for prospective secondary teachers focused on problem solving where silence was commonplace. (ASK)