The interplay between a visual task and elementary students’ mathematical discourse

This research was conducted by a fourth-grade teacher and doctoral student in mathematics education in conjunction with their advisor, a professor of mathematics education. A growing body of research in mathematics education has highlighted the importance of recognizing mathematics learning as a socially mediated activity. Indeed, mathematics education researchers have increasingly focused on how classroom dialogue can facilitate students’ creation of shared understandings. Aligned with this theoretical heritage, we recognize that human life and learning are inherently social and rooted in communication. We also recognize that student discourse is connected to student cognition and thus learning. Accordingly, this study relied on socio-cultural discourse analysis (Hennesy, et al., 2016, Mercer, 2010) both as a theoretical and a methodological tool to examine the nature of dialogue in one classroom in the context of students’ collaborative work on one visual task. We ask, given the centrality of task selection to fostering discourse, how the use of a visual task, as an instructional tool, might affect students’ peer-to-peer discourse practices?