An Analysis of the Prospective Teachers’ Noticing of Student Mathematical Thinking

Abstract

This study analyzed the prospective teachers’ noticing of students’ mathematical thinking. In the analysis of their skills of noticing, the main consideration was the details that the teachers attended to, the way that they interpreted students’ mathematical understanding and the practices that they would perform to support students’ mathematical understanding. The study employed a descriptive research model, which is one of the qualitative research methods. It was carried out with a total of 27 senior prospective middle school mathematics teachers in in a state university in the 2015-2016 academic year. In the data collection process, the prospective teachers were asked to analyze the 7th grade students’ solutions. Prospective teachers examined these solutions within the framework of the questions in relation to the subskills of attending to, interpreting, and deciding on the next step, which were identified by Jacobs et al. (2010) regarding the skill of noticing students’ mathematical thinking. The data analysis was conducted using the framework developed by Jacobs et al. as well. The study concluded that the prospective teachers were relatively better at the dimension of attending to than the dimension of interpreting and deciding on. Further, it was found that the prospective teachers overlooked the noteworthy mathematical details in the strategies of the students and focused on the operations performed by the students and that their interpretations did not indicate the students’ mathematical understanding. Moreover, the study revealed that the prospective teachers tended to come up with practice-based ideas and to use their own instructional knowledge rather than the students’ thinking in the dimension of deciding on the next step in their teaching.