Interaction Analysis of Student Teams Enacting the Practices of Collaborative Dynamic Geometry

Abstract: This workshop investigates excerpts from the logs of a virtual math team as it engages in dynamic-geometry exploration during eight hour-long sessions in a chat room with a multi-user version of GeoGebra. It describes the display of mathematical reasoning by the team of three eighth-grade students discussing the geometric dependencies of several figures. It follows the meaning-making process of the team to study how the team enacts foundational practices of collaborative dynamic geometry. The workshop focuses on several targeted excerpts in order to develop insights into specific research questions within a larger effort of working out the team’s learning trajectory. The workshop takes the form of a number of data sessions of collaborative analysis of detailed discourse and geometric activity. Collaborative learning has a variety of advantages, both for the participants and for educational researchers. For the participants, it can bring together resources, perspectives and proposals that would not be available to them individually. It can mediate between individual cognition and community knowledge, building group knowledge and group practices that situate community resources and that can subsequently be personalized. Thus, it can provide a non-didactic, student-centered, group-constructivist experience, which can overcome some of the barriers to school mathematics instruction. For educational researchers, it can provide an intimate view of learning processes as they take place in the media of interaction, which can be captured for detailed study. Through careful design of educational environments, authentic learning experiences can be facilitated and documented. The collaborators display for each other their contributions to the group knowledge building and these displays can be observed by others. This workshop makes available displays of a group of students as they learn the fundamentals of dynamic geometry. In it, one can observe learning taking place longitudinally as the student team follows an eight-hour trajectory of mathematical topics