Teacher noticing in science education: do you see what I see?

ABSTRACT

In recent years, teacher noticing has emerged as a construct to capture the dynamic and situational aspects of teaching expertise that underlies teachers’ in-the-moment teaching decisions and actions. In mathematics education research, in particular, teacher noticing has been studied to understand how teachers attend to, and make sense of, students’ mathematical thinking and reasoning. This construct has recently found its way into the science education literature. This paper reviews how the construct of teacher noticing has been understood and empirically investigated in the science education literature. We reviewed 29 empirical studies that focused on science teachers’ noticing and analysed how teacher noticing was defined and conceptualised in terms of its constituent components in these studies as well as the range of approaches used to investigate teacher noticing. Our analysis highlights how the original understanding of, and underlying assumptions about, teacher noticing have shifted as the construct has been imported into the science education literature. This review raises issues related to the investigation of teacher noticing and discusses how the findings of these studies can advance our existing knowledge of science teaching expertise. Finally, we propose directions for future research in this emerging field of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher noticing
• teaching expertise
• professional vision
• science education
• teacher development

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We did not include studies that focused on integrated STEM or integrative STEM education (Kelley & Knowles, 2016; Sanders, 2009) because of the differences between integrated/integrative STEM teaching and disciplinary teaching.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kennedy Kam Ho Chan

Kennedy Kam Ho Chan is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Pedagogical Content Knowledge, teacher noticing and use of video in teacher education.

Lihua Xu

Lihua Xu is a Senior Lecturer in Science Education in the School of Education, Deakin University. Her research work focuses on teacher knowledge and professional noticing through video-based approaches in the context of pre-service and in-service teacher education.

Rebecca Cooper

Rebecca Cooper is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Her research interests include Pedagogical Content Knowledge and the development of knowledge for science teacher education.

Amanda Berry

Amanda Berry is a Professor in STEM Education in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Amanda’s research interests focus on the development of science teachers’ knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge is shaped and articulated through teacher preparation, beginning teaching and in-service learning.

Jan H. van Driel

Jan H. van Driel is a Professor of science education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. His main research interests are related to the development of science teachers’ knowledge and beliefs in the context of teacher education and educational innovation