What exactly is Productive Struggle?

What exactly is productive struggle? The more the research team at Western Michigan University gathered empirical data about learners’ struggles, the more the members have questioned whether our field of mathematics education has a well-defined definition of productive struggle. In this talk, Nitchada will share with us how researchers whose studies related to productive struggle defined productive struggle in their research and what they have learned. She will also invite us to think about whether it is worthwhile to engage students in productive struggle and how this term might play an integral part in our current studies, especially those relating to mathematical wellbeing.
This has been a recording of a MSTEG Research Seminar held in 2024. Nitchada Kamlue is a teaching assistant and research assistant completing her PhD research study at Western Michigan University, USA, under the direction of Prof. Laura Van Zoest. She is involved with the National Science Foundation funded Building on MOSTs project. Nitchada has been investigating mathematically productive struggle since 2020. Besides productive struggle, her research interests also include exploring teachers' classroom norms and examining how teachers build on mathematical opportunities in student thinking across cultures.