Students' Possibilities to Learn From Group Discussions Integrated in Whole-class Teaching in Mathematics

The aim of this paper is to investigate how small-group and whole-class discussions during whole-class teaching contribute to students' learning. The study includes 33 video-recorded small-group discussions in four mathematics lessons on enlarging and reducing two-dimensional geometric figures in Grade 8. The results show that different objects of learning were enacted in the different small-groups' discussions, and that in the majority of the small-group discussions the students did not have the possibility to learn what was intended, since critical aspects were not explored. The combination of group and whole-class discussions contributed to that critical aspects of the specific subject matter came to the fore and thereby were possible to discern. The results indicate that small-group discussions without subsequent whole-class discussions may have less effect on student learning.