When Off-Task Is On-Track: Understanding Off-Task Activities in the Mathematics Classroom

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Abstract

When students are working on something outside the learning task, many educational practitioners believe that it is a sign of disengagement. While the concern is valid, we would like to propose an alternative view to understand students’ off-task behaviors. The participants of this study were fifteen students from a school in the midwestern U.S. The data were gathered from group and classroom discussion, analyzed qualitatively using a constant comparative method. The result showed that students’ off-task activities might benefit the classroom dynamic, such as to invite joint attentions, make personal connections, connect to previous materials, and to direct peer’s focus back to the original task. As such, some off-task behaviors could potentially be employed to enhance learning engagement.

Authors

• Ratih Ayu Apsari, University of California - Berkeley

• Mozzie Dosalmas, Northeastern University

• Siqi Huang, University of California - Berkeley

• Anna Weltman, XQ Institute