Ability to Notice Mathematics Specific Phenomena: What Exactly Do Student Teachers Attend to?

The aim of this paper is to a) shed light on the nature of student teachers’ noticing of mathematics specific phenomena as observed in a video recorded lesson and to b) compare this nature for student teachers at the beginning of their master studies at the university and those at its end. Our study is based on a thorough examination of student teachers’ written analyses (n = 169) of video recorded lessons. We capture the qualities of these in terms of the author-defined notion of mathematics specific (or MS) phenomena by a) matching the students’ comments against what we view as important issues in the lessons, and b) developing a framework to further characterise the nature of the observations. Both qualitative and quantitative results corroborate the findings of earlier research on pre-service teachers’ lesson analyses in that they pay limited attention to content in the lesson observed. Moreover, it transpires that students tend to notice MS phenomena which are not identified as important by experts and that the demonstrated ability to notice MS phenomena does not show significant differences for students in two distinct stages of a teacher preparation programme.

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