Do Student Teachers Attend to Mathematics Specific Phenomena when Observing Mathematics Teaching on Video?

Abstract

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.

Ability to Notice Mathematics Specific Phenomena: What Exactly Do Student Teachers Attend to?

“…This again confirms our previous results (Vondrová & Žalská, 2012). Although there were opportunities for noticing a teacher's mathematical errors or misrepresentations in all three videos, only a very small proportion of students (13%) noticed at least one of these and only two of the 58 students watching the video commented on a moment where the teacher's incorrectness was an important feature of the lesson, possibly hindering pupils' understanding of the content taught.…”

“…The presented study is a continuation of our previous study (Vondrová & Žalská, 2012), in which we were able to report the results of a detailed examination of 30 students' written analyses of a video recording of one full mathematics lesson. Overall, we confirmed that although the group of participants paid attention to issues of general pedagogy and classroom management, they did not tend to notice and comment on even prominent aspects related to mathematical content, such as a carefully devised series of tasks that the teacher in the video used to introduce new mathematical content, or the mathematics content contained in individual pupil-teacher interaction.…”

“…The data were collected between 2009 and 2014. 10 The Australian lesson has already been shown to serve our needs in our previous study (Vondrová & Žalská, 2012). 11 See http://www.timssvideo.com/videos/mathematics/Australia and http://www.timssvideo .com/videos/mathematics/Hong%20Kong.…”

Values and Valuing in Mathematics Education

“…It has been suggested that teachers' decisions are impacted by school culture, the teacher's mathematical knowledge and their knowledge of mathematics teaching, the teaching situation, goals, learning outcomes, teacher's experience, and their beliefs and values Jacobs et al 2010). Investigations have also related decision-making processes in terms of teachers' internal knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and practices (Bartlett 1932;Fisher et al 2014;Vondrová and Žalská 2012). inferred decision-making to be basically influenced by values.…”

“…Teachers' values (Bishop 2008a, pp. 191-203) and teachers' noticing (Vondrová and Žalská 2012) depend, at least to some extent, on the lesson content. In this study, the notion of regular polygons was the focus for all class groups.…”