What Does it Mean to Notice my Students’ Ideas in Science Today?: An Investigation of Elementary Teachers’ Practice of Noticing their Students’ Thinking in Science

Abstract

Efforts toward improving K-12 science education emphasize teachers noticing students’ thinking as they engage in disciplinary practices and reasoning. This noticing requires specialized teacher knowledge and skills as it involves attending to students’ ideas, as well as making sense of and responding to those ideas so that the disciplinary substance in them is recognized, made explicit, and supported. This study investigates three elementary teachers’ in-the-moment noticing of students’ ideas while teaching science and their thinking about what it means to engage in this teaching practice. Results indicate that teachers notice many different kinds of student science ideas, and also that teachers have different ways of thinking about which student ideas are substantive during a science lesson. This research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the nature of teacher noticing in science. Noticing students’ science ideas involves not only the presence of ideas and the ability to notice them, but also a teacher’s understanding of this teaching practice in the moment.

Notes

1 There was some variation between the teachers and within each teacher in both the number of moments captured and the distribution of those moments across and within tapings. This variation is discussed in detail in a different methodological paper examining the use of wearable technologies and participant collected data in educational research (Luna, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

Melissa J. Luna, Department of Curriculum and Instruction/Literacy Studies, West Virginia University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DRL-1552428. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.