Abstract
A teachers’ ability to notice and analyse the substance of student thinking, is an important feature of effective science teaching. To prepare new science teachers to attend to students’ thinking, it is important for teacher educators to first understand what novice teachers notice in science classrooms, what they associate with the idea of noticing and in what ways their noticing skills can progress. To study novice teachers’ noticing abilities, our study employs two different assessment tools, an open noticing assignment and a focused noticing task as pre and post assessments during a semester long science methods course. We report on a variety of noticing themes that highlight a wide variation in what the novice teachers perceive as important to notice in science classrooms. Pre-post analysis of these noticing themes suggests a shift in noticing from general classroom aspects towards noticing science specific aspects as science topics or concepts being discussed and students’ ideas about those. Using a mixed methods analysis lens for both tools, we present various sophistication levels of teacher noticing. These levels not just serve as an indicator of the PSTs’ noticing skills but also as a framework for educators to help PSTs develop responsive teaching strategies in elementary science classrooms.
Highlights
To prepare new science teachers to attend to students’ thinking, it is important for teacher educators to first understand what novice teachers notice in science classrooms, what they associate with the idea of noticing and in what ways their noticing skills can progress
We report on a variety of noticing themes that highlight a wide variation in what the novice teachers perceive as important to notice in science classrooms
In light of the arguments presented above, we propose to investigate the following research questions: 1) What do elementary pre-service teachers perceive as essential or important to notice in science classrooms?
Summary
It requires teachers to attend to student thinking in ways that it could contribute to scientific sense making and knowledge building while avoiding the pitfalls of viewing students’ science ideas as “correct” or “incorrect” (Coffey, Hammer, Levin, & Grant, 2011). Being able to notice and analyze student ideas is a pre-requisite to be able to respond to them and is deemed essential to responsive teaching in science classrooms (Levin, Hammer, & Coffey, 2009). The skills of noticing, analyzing and responding to student ideas, demand know-how of scientific disciplinary knowledge (McNeill, 2009; Zangori, Forbes, & Biggers, 2013), content knowledge for teaching and pedagogical content knowledge (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008). An understanding of what it means to notice student thinking and its purpose is essential to its implementation in classrooms and requires significant training and support
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