Supporting college students to communicate productively in groups: A self-awareness intervention

Abstract

Dialogic teaching, or instruction centered around inquiry and student communication, is a popular instructional approach that can support students to construct mathematical knowledge. One obstacle to dialogic teaching is that teachers have difficulty supporting students to communicate and collaborate productively in groups. We conducted an intervention with 25 college students that was designed to support them to communicate effectively in groups by promoting self-awareness. The self-awareness intervention contained two phases. First, students listened to audio recordings of themselves working in groups on a mathematics task. Second, they responded to reflection questions about the effectiveness of their communication and collaboration. After students reflected on the effectiveness of their communication and collaboration, they were audio-recorded once more to determine whether the self-awareness intervention supported students to change their collaborative behaviors. We provide quantitative and qualitative findings that reveal that the intervention was moderately successful in supporting students to change their collaborative behaviors positively. The findings of this study imply that the self-awareness intervention might support students towards improving their group collaboration in mathematics.

Keywords

• Mathematics
• Dialogic instruction
• Objective self-awareness theory
• Collaborative learning