Teacher Intervention in Collaborative Mathematics Problem Solving in Secondary School

In PISA 2015, students from four China mainland cities/provinces performed worse in collaborative problem solving (CPS) than in other subjects. While student collaboration has been widely implemented in Chinese classrooms since 2001, empirical research on the role and intervention of teachers is still quite scarce. Influenced by international and national tests, open-ended tasks have been widely developed and used during mathematics lessons, which are seen as more suitable for CPS. In this paper, we investigated the effect of teacher interventionTeacher intervention during pair and group CPS by experimenting with four teachers in eight classes, then selected a few typical cases and analysed their effect on task performance regarding intervention focusIntervention focus and means. Three of the four teachers’ interventions proved effective. The most and least effective teachers were selected for the case study. We discussed the effect of teacher interventionTeacher intervention in terms of intervention styles and control. Because teachers in Chinese/Western classrooms differ in authority, we discussed intervention styles and offered suggestions for choosing and carefully implementing appropriate forms of group collaboration.