Off Topic but on Point: Student Talk in an Undergraduate Geometry Classroom

This paper focuses on the role that off-topic talk can play in a classroom. Although such talk has been typically ignored in the undergraduate STEM education literature, we argue that it can be highly consequential to the learning environment and thus should be taken into account. To study off-topic talk, we followed four groups throughout the semester in an upper-division Foundations of Geometry course, analyzing the talk in terms of student goals and gender. We focus on how such talk could influence the building of trust and power dynamics in small group interactions. We found that off-topic talk was prevalent (>30% of talk) and played a variety of roles in group discussions.