Classroom Data Visualization: Tracking Individuals During Group-Centered Instruction

Understanding students’ participation in collaborative classroom settings is important in a variety of educational contexts, with implications for teaching, research, and equity. Using data from a group-centered developmental mathematics class, this research brief illustrates novel quantitative representations of students’ group participation and their instructor’s classroom activity. Presenting an overview of classroom activities based on audio data, the diagrams show a variety of patterns, including each group’s progression through assigned tasks, some students’ exclusion from discussions of those tasks, and the teacher’s patterns of interaction with groups. The representations provide new ways that researchers might approach and present multilayered classroom data.