https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7026-7112
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ABSTRACT
We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then apply the TRC to an excerpt of classroom mathematics discourse to demonstrate the affordances of this approach. We conclude by making several further observations about the potential versatility and power in articulating units of analysis and developing and applying tools that attend to these facets when conducting research on teacher responses.
Acknowledgements
Preliminary versions of the ideas in this paper were presented at the 41st Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics (Peterson et al., Citation2017) and the Citation2018 American Educational Research Association Annual Conference (Peterson et al., Citation2018).
The authors thank Napthalin Atanga, Rachel Bernard, Elizabeth Fraser, Alicia Heninger, Carlee Madis, Mary Ochieng, Kylie Palsky, Joshua Ruk, and Amanda Seiwell for their contributions to developing the Teacher Response Coding Scheme (TRC).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 When a student contribution emerges during classroom instruction, we acknowledge both that teachers initially make an internal decision about how to respond to a student contribution and that students could also be engaging internally with a student contribution. The focus here is on public engagement.
2 We developed the TRC in tandem with our use of the literature to identify the facets as we analyzed data for our larger project (see BuildingonMOSTs.org). Over the past ten years we have analyzed the following data from grades 6–12 mathematics teachers: videotaped mathematics lessons chosen to reflect the diversity of teachers, students, mathematics, and curricula present in US schools (see Van Zoest et al., Citation2017 for more details), interview data of teachers responding to a common set of student mathematical contributions with varying potential (see Stockero et al., Citation2020), and videotapes of teacher-researchers’ classroom use of MOST-eliciting prompts (see Leatham et al., Citation2020).
3 We have removed individual lines numbers, and instead numbered conversational turns to better reflect our units of analysis (see ). We have shaded the students’ turns to distinguish them from the teacher’s and used brackets to denote non-verbal actions. In line 26, the teacher’s full turn includes both responding to the preceding SMC (not italicized, coded) and making a clear shift to an activity that is not responding to that SMC (italicized, not coded). To the right of each SMC we have articulated the Student Mathematics (SM) and Mathematical Point (MP) of that contribution to support the application of the Mathematical Alignment category of the TRC. To the right of the teacher response, we have provided the TRC codes for each coding category. A slight, but important, modification we have made to the transcript occurs in lines 10, 14, 20, and 24. Specifically, without access to the original classroom video, we are assuming that in these teacher responses the teacher posed a question to the whole class, waited for student hands, and then selected a volunteer to respond. To indicate this, we have added ‘[assumed pause]’ to those teacher responses and coded what preceded the teacher calling on one student. This distinction is important because it has implications for the Actor coding of the teacher response.