Using representations of practice to elicit mathematics teachers’ tacit knowledge of practice: a comparison of responses to animations and videos

Abstract

This study compared conversations among groups of teachers of high school geometry that had been elicited by a representation of instruction (either a video or an animation) and facilitated with an open-ended agenda. All artifacts used represented instruction scenarios that departed from what, according to prior work, had been hypothesized as normative. We used as the dependent variable the proportion of modal statements about instructional practice made by a group, which we argue is a good quantitative indicator that the statement appeals to the group’s knowledge of the norms of practice. Animations and videos produced similar proportion of modal statements, but the types of modal statements differed—with animations being associated with more statements of probability and obligation and videos being associated with more statements of inclination. Overall, the results suggest that animations are just as useful as videos in eliciting these sorts of orientational meanings.