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Student noticing of collaborative practices: exploring how college students notice during small group interactions in math

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Abstract

Over the last three decades, educational researchers and policymakers have increasingly promoted instructional strategies that centralize group work in mathematics. One difficulty teachers face in implementing group-based instruction in mathematics involves facilitating meaningful group interaction amongst students. In this paper, we explore student noticing as a novel strategy for supporting college students to collaborate effectively during group work in mathematics. First, we construct a noticing framework named student noticing of collaborative practices which provides a lens for “seeing” how students notice their collaborative practices. Then, we use the framework to explore how 25 college students noticed their collaborative practices in mathematics. After working on a novel mathematics task in groups, the college students listened to audiorecordings of their group interactions and responded to reflection questions about the effectiveness of their collaboration. We identified themes regarding how and what students noticed related to their collaborative practices. The findings reveal that students attended to many aspects of their collaboration, including their talking turns and propensity to listen to others. Students demonstrated a desire to change their collaborative practices in the future. The findings imply that teachers and researchers might leverage student noticing as a tool for improvement in mathematics group-based classrooms.

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Data availability

The dataset analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to continued analysis and privacy of participants but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Although König et al.’s (2022) research refers to teacher noticing, these perspectives map nicely onto student noticing as well.

  2. We do not exemplify the chain through “being recorded” because this chain is unlikely to be present in group collaboration when audio recorders are not used.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Crandall University, 333 Gorge Rd, Moncton, NB, E1G 3H9, Canada

    Tye G. Campbell

  2. Daegu National University of Education, 710 Sangrok Education Center, Daegu, South Korea

    Sheunghyun Yeo

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  1. Tye G. Campbell
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  2. Sheunghyun Yeo
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Correspondence to Tye G. Campbell.

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Campbell, T.G., Yeo, S. Student noticing of collaborative practices: exploring how college students notice during small group interactions in math. Educ Stud Math 113, 405–423 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-023-10206-3

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