A key requirement of successful initial teacher education is the development of professional vision, which includes shifting attention to features of the situation relevant to the specialized goals of teaching. Existing research hints at the value of targeted video-based courses in the development of professional vision, but often raises questions about the sources of shifts in the pattern of attention. We argue that existing work makes it difficult to distinguish if shifts seen across video interventions are the results of the intervention, teaching experience or methodological issues with the unbalanced use of videos in the data collection in these studies. Our first study suggests pre-service teachers' teaching practice experience does not notably affect attention, but that choice of video does. Our second study addresses the methodological issues and suggests that we may discount different or unbalanced videos as a source of the shifts in the pattern of attention. Finally, by introducing a new synthesis of the results in the literature, we identify a previously hidden key distinction between studies and suggest reasons why different studies have shown different results in this area.
Abstract:The aim of this paper is to a) shed light on the nature of student teachers' noticing of mathematics specific phenomena as observed in a video recorded lesson and to b) compare this nature for student teachers at the beginning of their master studies at the university and those at its end. Our study is based on a thorough examination of student teachers' written analyses (n = 169) of video recorded lessons. We capture the qualities of these in terms of the author-defined notion of mathematics specific (or MS) phenomena by a) matching the students' comments against what we view as important issues in the lessons, and b) developing a framework to further characterise the nature of the observations. Both qualitative and quantitative results corroborate the findings of earlier research on pre-service teachers' lesson analyses in that they pay limited attention to content in the lesson observed. Moreover, it transpires that students tend to notice MS phenomena which are not identified as important by experts and that the demonstrated ability to notice MS phenomena does not show significant differences for students in two distinct stages of a teacher preparation programme.
This article describes the results of an investigation into pre-service teachers' ability to notice mathematics specific phenomena in a lesson observed on a video recording. Thirty mathematics education students' written analyses of a viewed lesson were subjected to a selective content analysis. The results of both qualitative and quantitative nature conform with earlier research on pre-service teachers' lesson analyses and, in addition, bring detailed report not only on the participants' ability to notice but also on categories of content-related observable aspects of teaching. The discussion focuses on situating the findings within the framework of pedagogical content knowledge and indicates ways to further link the ability to notice to both teacher development design and effective teaching practice.
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