Productive struggle during collaborative problem-solving

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Productive struggle during collaborative problem-solving: Developing a fuller picture

Productive struggle occurs when students are required to persevere in solving challenging mathematics problems. Such struggle is of crucial importance to students’ learning, yet the field’s understanding of it remains underspecified. Existing descriptions frame struggle as either productive or unproductive. However, like most aspects of learning, struggle is likely to present in a range of ways. Knowledge of the many different types of struggle students experience can inform teachers’ responses to struggle. In this study, we developed a novel framework describing various types of struggle students encounter in solving mathematics problems collaboratively. We developed this framework in a video-club involving four mathematics education researchers. Together, we viewed and discussed a collection of eight video-clips portraying students struggling to varying degrees and in varying ways. Our work was guided initially by a rudimentary framework describing struggle that we created by consolidating existing descriptions of struggle in the literature. In our discussions together, we arrived at various insights regarding struggle and identified a number of features distinguishing different types of struggle. We incorporated these insights and features into our emergent framework. I will present a novel framework that accounts for and describes a host of cognitive, social, and socio-cognitive struggles, and that may offer teachers support in formatively assessing the magnitude of students’ struggles, something that has proven challenging to do.

Author

• Michael Jarry-Shore, Stanford University