Supporting Students’ Participation in Collective Argumentation: Use of Displays in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom

Thoughtful and purposeful displays can support students’ participation in argumentation. This report addresses how displays are used within collective argumentation. We examined a secondary mathematics teacher’s and her students’ use of displays during selected episodes of collective argumentation. From video classroom observations and interviews with the teacher, we extracted several kinds of displays according to their functions and then investigated how these displays supported collective argumentation as direct contributions to the argument or actions supporting the argumentation. Furthermore, we also considered actions by the teacher that supported her students to display. We found displays can be both part of the mathematical argument and supportive of the mathematical argumentation. This finding has direct implications for studying mathematical discussions because the literature has primarily focused on verbal contributions to the argument over nonverbal contributions such as displays.

Foster, J., Conner, A., Zhuang, Y., Singletary, L., & Park, H. (2024). Supporting students’ participation in collective argumentation: Use of displays in a secondary mathematics classroom. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10986065.2024.2371515