The relationships between student content-specific grouping and teachers-students’ interactions during online collaborative mathematical task solving

We examined the relationships between student content-specific grouping and the attributes of teachers-students’ interactions during online collaborative mathematical task solving using a learning analytics tool for automatic formative assessment. Such technology offloads some teachers’ responsibilities regarding mathematical aspects of learning, and we therefore ask, what are the characteristics of teachers’ interactions with students in this context? How do these characteristics relate to content-specific grouping? We examined teachers’ interactions with 29 pairs of 10th-grade students in distance group mathematics learning in a technological environment on the subject of the quadratic function. Students were teamed according to their work on a preliminary task in one of the following ways: encompassing, mutual, or similar. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of teachers’ interactions with students and interviews were conducted. We identified four categories of teacher actions that characterize dialog facilitation: task comprehension, technology use, mathematics content, and interpersonal interactions. The findings showed that teachers initiated more inferences than students in the interpersonal and task comprehension categories, while there was no significant difference between the initiators of the other categories. Furthermore, teachers and students initiated interpersonal interactions significantly more when groups were grouped with unbalanced relationships (encompassing, commonly known as heterogeneous grouping). These findings shed light on the potential to foster nuanced abilities of mathematics teachers to facilitate group work.