Examining the role of group work as an effective instructional strategy when teaching problem solving

International audienceThis paper reports on a post-primary classroom intervention conducted to investigate the effect that carrying out problem solving in small groups as an instructional strategy has on the problem-solving performance of individual students. Over the course of the 6-week intervention students were introduced to an explicit problem-solving framework and challenged to solve weekly problems both in small mixed-ability groups and also individually during their traditional mathematics classes. It was found that there was a strong correlation between the problem-solving performance of the small groups and that of the individual students which suggests that group work could be utilised as an effective instructional strategy when teaching problem solving