Measuring Elementary Mathematics Teachers’ Noticing: Using Child Study as a Vehicle

Heidi L. Beattie, Lixin Ren, Wendy M. Smith and Ruth M. Heaton

Abstract This study qualitatively examines teacher noticing among 22 primary teachers who conducted child studies, in which they sought to better capture two students’ mathematical understanding. Noticing students’ mathematical thinking is a key component to better understand student learning and effective teaching. Five levels of teacher noticing were specified for this framework (adapted from the van Es, 2011). The teacher noticing framework ranges from Level 1, general statements or claims about what a student could and could not do, to Level 4, description of detailed evidence, analysis, and discussion of future support that will be provided to students. The authors found teachers on average exhibited Level 2 noticing abilities. This adapted framework may be beneficial in helping teachers notice and understand students’ mathematical thinking, as well as provide teacher educators with a tool with which to use to measure teachers’ noticing abilities.

Keywords Teacher noticing Professional development In-service teachers Elementary mathematics Child observation

Heidi. L. Beattie and Lixin Ren contributed equally to this chapter.

H.L. Beattie (H)

Troy University, Troy, NY, USA e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

L. Ren

East China Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

W.M. Smith • R.M. Heaton

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.M. Heaton

e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 321

E.O. Schack et al. (eds.), Teacher Noticing: Bridging and Broadening Perspectives, Contexts, and Frameworks, Research in Mathematics Education,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46753-5_19

Introduction

Mathematics education reform requires teachers to pay particular attention to students’ ideas, adapting their teaching accordingly (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2000). “This ability to adapt one’s teaching in the midst of instruction requires that teachers be able to notice aspects of reform pedagogy and interpret what is happening in their classrooms in new ways” (van Es & Sherin, 2008, p. 244). Research indicates that learning to notice can be challenging for teachers (Franke, Carpenter, Fennema, Ansell, & Behrend, 1998). As professional development efforts have been devoted to improving teachers’ noticing skills, it becomes necessary to capture teachers’ progress in learning to notice in a measurable way. One project, Primarily Math, tried to help K-3 elementary teachers learn skills of noticing through a Child Study project, which is an in-depth observation of a single child. In this study, we adapted a preexisting framework of teacher noticing developed by van Es (2011), and used it to assess the levels of noticing teachers demonstrated in a Child Study project.

This study focused on two research questions: (1) In what ways can we adapt van Es’s (2011) framework intended for coding classroom video to instead code written teacher reflections and how can this framework be used to characterize teachers’ noticing of student mathematical thinking? (2) To what extent do levels of teacher noticing correlate with teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and beliefs about mathematics learning and teaching?