Teachers’ perspectives on dealing with students’ errors

Abstract

With adequate support for the learner, errors can have high learning potential. This study investigates rather unsuitable action patterns of teachers in dealing with errors. Teachers rarely investigate the causes that evoke the occurrence of individual students’ errors, but instead often change addressees immediately after an error occurs. Such behavior is frequent in the classroom, leaving unexploited, yet important potential to learn from errors. It has remained unexplained why teachers act the way they do in error situations. Using video-stimulated recalls, I investigate the reasons for teachers’ behavior in students’ error situations by confronting them with recorded episodes from their own teaching. Error situations are analyzed (within-case) and teachers’ beliefs are classified in an explanatory model (cross-case) to illustrate patterns across teachers. Results show that teachers refer to an interaction of student attributes, their own attributes, and error attributes when reasoning their own behavior. I find that reference to specific attributes varies depending on the situation, and so do the described reasons that led to a particular behavior as a spontaneous or more reflective decision.