RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Setting Up Group Tasks: Rights and Duties of Instructors and Students
Page: 729
In this contributed report, we share results from a study focused on the verbal communication acts of four undergraduate mathematics instructors while they are setting up group tasks. All four instructors teach at the same large eastern university and are experienced with active learning instructional practices. We found that two of the four instructors engaged in numerous verbal communication acts that assigned rights and duties to themselves as instructors and to their students. The other two instructors assigned only a few rights and duties to themselves or to students. We describe patterns in instructors’ assignment of rights and duties, as well as how instructors' verbal communication acts shaped the classroom learning environment. Finally, we suggest how verbal communication acts focused on assigning rights and duties may relate to opportunities to learn, and propose considerations for supporting students’ participation in group work in active learning undergraduate mathematics classrooms.