Prospective elementary mathematics teachers' noticing of childrens' mathematics: a focus on extending moves

Abstract

Professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking (Jacobs et al. in J Res Math Educ 41(2):169-202, 2010) is a construct that is used frequently to understand the ways in which teachers attend to, interpret, and respond to children's mathematical thinking. in this paper, we present our analysis of prospective elementary mathematics teachers' (PTs') responses to a pedagogical activity designed to engage them in an approximation (Grossman et al. in Teach Coll Rec 111(9): 2055-2100, 2009) of professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking in the moment of teaching, with a focus on developing responses which extend the student's thinking. PTs were provided two different examples of student work and a series of questions designed to elicit information about their ability to professionally notice student work. We present data and analysis of 73 PTs' abilities to engage in the individual skills associated with noticing as well as their abilities to use the skills cohesively in concert. Our results demonstrate the type of representation used determined PTs' success in all three facets of noticing, with a particular effect on interpreting. Further, our focus on a specific type of response move, along with the introduction of a scaffold for that response move, made a difference in PTs' ability to successfully respond to student work when compared to a prior study with the same PTs (Tyminski et al.2014). We unpack these results along with suggestions for pedagogical practice as well as directions for future research.