Summary and response to reading “Group Flow in Small Groups of Middle School Mathematics Students”

In her paper Group Flow in Small Groups of Middle School Mathematics Students, Armstrong looked into two questions: 1) what are the observable characteristics of group flow, and 2) what conditions may help to promote the experience of group flow in small groups in a regular mathematics classroom setting? 

Flow is a state in which a learner or a group (individual flow/group flow) is/are highly absorbed to an activity and he/they will do it even at great cost for the sheer sake of doing it (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). The occurrence of group flow suggests the individual/group is learning. So it is the optimal state of learning and the author is interested in finding out what characteristics are there when such state occurs and what contribute to the occurrence.

There are three rounds of observation. In the first round, the author observed a maths class of grade eight students. In the 40 minutes class, she carried a camera and walked around to record any moment interested her. In the second and third round, she filmed the students in her own classroom. Instead of carrying a camera walking around, she focused her camera to the focus groups in the latter two sessions. All classrooms were highly student-centred, that is students were left to solve problems in groups for the most of the time.

Since I am very interested to the topic, I continued to read the rest of the article. Having analyzed the data, the author concluded that when group flow occurred, “individuals moved closer together, their eye contact became longer and more frequent, their gestures began to mirror each others, their speech became faster and more fragmented as their communication became more efficient”. As to the conditions of group flow, the author argued that task should be of interest of the group and be level appropriate and that the group should be open for discussion.

Furthermore, since I am interested in second language learning, I read the work mentioned in the article about flow theory in second language classroom (Egbert, 2003). The paper also supports that a task that is of students’ interest is more likely to induce flow and the chances to reach flow is bigger if second language learners are allowed to use their first language in the task.

Finally, I noticed the way of the author collecting data was of the issue we discussed in class. In the first session, she carried a camera and walked around the classroom to film any situation interesting her. This is a very direct observation and might provide the most vivid data for the researchers. However, as we discussed, having an outsider walking around and recording them, the participants might behave differently. Different from Armstrong, the Egbert’s methods of data collection were more comprehensive: asking participants to finish questionnaires of perception survey, observing and filling a checklist during observation, collecting task products and conducting post task interviews with the participants. Comprehensive as the latter methodology is, it is not as direct and intuitive as the former. So which methodology do you prefer?