Preservice Mathematics Teachers’ Selective Attention and Professional Knowledge–Based Reasoning About Students’ Statistical Thinking

Abstract

This study examined preservice mathematics teachers’ selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning as they viewed a statistics lesson video. Analysis for this study was based on preservice teachers’ written explanations for noteworthy moments they identified when watching the video. Findings indicated that, with regard to the preservice teachers’ selective attention, they attended more to the teacher’s pedagogy in the video than to students and students’ statistical thinking. Analysis of the preservice teachers’ knowledge–based reasoning revealed that they were more likely to use an interpretive stance than a descriptive or an evaluate stance to reason about what they observed. The preservice teachers, however, were less likely to draw on their statistical knowledge needed for teaching to reason about students’ statistical thinking. Rather, the preservice teachers’ noticing was informed by their general pedagogical knowledge or knowledge that was unrelated to statistical thinking. The current study suggests that professional knowledge for teaching in a particular domain should be incorporated into the examination of teacher noticing in order to better understand the ways in which teachers notice.