- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1557388
- First Name Behailu
- Last Name Mammo
- Institution Hofstra University
- Role/Position Principal Investigator
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Biological
- Target Audience Evaluators/Education Researchers, Higher Education Institution Administrators, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Project PIs / Co-PIs / Other Faculty/Staff, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Supporting New Teachers
- Session Length 45 minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Raymond LaRochelle, rlaroche@udel.edu, University of Delaware, Research Collaborator
Goals
1. Will learn about the three components of professional noticing: attending, interpreting, and deciding to respond
2. Will learn what cognitive resources teachers need to use to develop professional noticing skills
3. Will learn about the research agenda regarding the correlation between Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and Professional Noticing of student thinking
Evidence
We found evidence that there is a correlation between specialized content knowledge and professional noticing expertise.
Proposal
Professional noticing of students’ mathematical thinking is an important but challenging expertise for teachers to develop. One way we can understand the development of this expertise is by understanding what cognitive resources teachers utilize in order to effectively “professionally notice” a student’s work. Theoretically, cognitive resources such as mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and beliefs that motivate teachers to be responsive to their students would support sophisticated professional noticing skills. However, empirical investigations into connections between such cognitive resources and professional noticing have uncovered mixed evidence; some studies find evidence of such connections, while others do not. In this workshop, we share results from a study in which we uncovered a connection between teachers’ MKT and professional noticing expertise. In particular, we found evidence that a strong specialized content knowledge, as measured by the number of different solution strategies teachers used to solve one task, may correlate with a more sophisticated ability to decide how to respond to a student based on the student’s mathematical understandings. This finding implies that knowledge of multiple solution strategies may support teachers’ deciding how to respond skills. Samples of students’ work will be used to give opportunities for the audience to practice the three components of professional noticing of student mathematical thinking.
