Leveraging and connecting conceptions of amount and change: A content-specific approach to adaptive teaching practices

Abstract

Adaptive teaching on the micro level of teacher-student interaction has often been investigated, but rarely with respect to students’ content-specific learning pathways. This article presents a content-specific analytic approach how to disentangle the learning content and to capture teaching practices for the particular content of functional relationships. The empirical part of the article refers to a data set analyzed in several articles, video data from a teaching experiment in a Grade 9 classroom on covariation in the inclined place. The video data is qualitatively analyzed with respect to students’ conceptions of amount and change in correspondence and covariation approaches. This allows to unpack the adaptive teaching practices by means of teachers’ targeted steering trajectories for navigating from students’ initial conceptions towards the intended conceptual aspects. The qualitative analysis identifies adaptive teaching practices which go beyond a content-independent list of teacher moves.