Abstract:

At the beginning of the year of 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Portuguese classrooms were teleported to virtual environments. It was necessary to adapt learning tasks and teaching methods, expand educational resources and rethink assessment. In September 2020, with the return of face-to-face education, there were many constraints imposed by health safety rules, making group work in the classroom unfeasible. Yet, group work brings students numerous advantages in terms of learning (mathematical content, transversal and personal skills, etc.).

In the school where the fist author was completing her student teaching internship, there was an optional moment in students’ weekly schedule, named APE, where students were challenged to solve problems in a virtual environment, in small groups. Yet, with the unfolding of the pandemic, face-to-face teaching was again suspended, including the APE. However, it became possible to engage students in solving tasks collaboratively at online classes. The type of problems proposed and the kind of student participation varied according to these two virtual environments: at the APE, the problems were not directly related to the content taught in the classes and student participation was voluntary; during online classes, the problems already had a specific curricular intent, and student participation was mandatory.

Our goal was to investigate the interactions among 7th graders (12 years-old) when engaged in solving mathematical problems, in small groups, in those two virtual environments: APE and online classes. Several research questions guided our study:
1. What skills do students develop when solving problems in groups in a virtual environment?
1.1) How do they organize themselves inside the group?
1.2) How do they communicate?
1.3) How do they manage the contributions of each element?
1.4) How do they solve conflicts? 1.5) How do they help each other?
1.6) What strategies do they use to solve problems?
1.7) What are the main challenges they face and how do they overcome them? 2. What are students' perceptions about solving problems in face-to-face and virtual environments?

Data were collected using different sources and instruments: observation of students' work and audio-recording of all virtual sessions (in APE and in online classes, using the affordances of the Teams platform); semi-structured interviews (with nine of the 55 students involved, selected to reflect a variety of school performance and degree of involvement in online collaborative problem solving); students’ written productions (at APE and online classes).

Preliminary data analysis suggests that group work in virtual environments demands students to develop other skills than "just" problem solving. They rely on each other to cope with technical difficulties (writing mathematical notation, communicating without microphone, ...). Some of these difficulties proved to be the same if the students were working in groups in person (time management, negotiate solutions,…). Students highlighted different possibilities of virtual environments comparing to those provided by face-to-face contexts, like being able to do surveys and present them to colleagues, working in more intimate and quieter environments,…). As expected, group work was a productive setting to develop problem solving skills, but not all groups worked nicely - in some groups, students' interaction was quite low, and their learning fell short of what it could be.

Keywords:

Group work, problem solving, student interactions, virtual environments.