The Nature of Discourse as Students Collaborate on a Mathematics WebQuest
Title:
The Nature of Discourse as Students Collaborate on a Mathematics WebQuest
Author:
Orme, Michelle P. Monroe, Eula Ewing
Appeared in:
Computers in the schools
Paging:
Volume 22 (2005) nr. 1-2 pages 135-146
Year:
2005-07-12
Contents:
Students were audiotaped while working in teams on a WebQuest. Although gender-segregated, each team included both fifth-and sixth-graders. Interactions from two tasks were analyzed according to categories (exploratory, cumulative, disputational, tutorial) defined by the Spoken Language and New Technology (SLANT) project (e.g., Wegerif & Scrimshaw, 1997) and were coded as either mathematical or task-procedural. Findings emerged related to three major themes: task, gender, and power. For one task, student discourse was largely mathematical, with cumulative and tutorial discourse patterns predominant; for the other task, interactions were primarily task-procedural and followed mostly cumulative and disputational patterns. Exploratory discourse, considered to be the most educationally useful (Fisher, 1997), occurred during both tasks. Largely, girls' interactions were characterized by cooperation and boys' interactions by disputations. Disputations also occurred between team members of differing grade levels regarding how power was held and used.
Journal description