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Creators/Authors contains: "Fisher, Molly H."

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  1. Consider dimensions of equity to enact more responsive mathematics teaching in the elementary classroom.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available February 1, 2025
  2. This study examined potential bias with respect to perceived gender and race in pre-service teachers’ professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking. The goal of the study was to explore emerging connections between professional noticing and equity concerns in mathematics education and discover the extent to which such noticing may be influenced by a student’s race and gender. A sample of 151 preservice teachers participated, and our findings suggest that bias tends to emerge in the interpreting phase of professional noticing; however, such emergence was not statistically significant when compared across the perceived race and gender of the students. 
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  3. Abstract

    The framework of professional noticing describes three components (attending, interpreting, and deciding) that allow teachers to better understand the thinking of their students. Via this method, teachers attend to their classroom by observing relevant cues from students, interpret these cues based on their knowledge of student development, and decide how best to proceed in their lesson. This study utilized an open‐response survey to collect data regarding the professional noticing skills, physics and mathematics content knowledge, and teaching experience of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics graduate students. Participants were given a physics and calculus problem to solve to assess their level of content knowledge and then watched a video‐based scenario of a teacher and student discussing the same problems. After, participants were prompted to answer questions corresponding with the attending, interpreting, and deciding components of professional noticing. We found significant results that suggest teaching experience alone is not enough to employ professional noticing skills when attending physics scenarios, and that possessing content knowledge has a positive impact on professional noticing ability, both overall and within the components.

     
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  4. Teacher noticing and related variants have ascended in prominence among the mathematics education research community. While the component processes of such noticing (e.g., attending, interpreting and deciding) have been cast as interrelated, capturing the relationships amongst the components has been more elusive. We focused on the component processes of teacher noticing with particular attention given to interrelatedness. Specifically, we were interested in how and the extent to which the component processes of professional noticing (attending, interpreting, deciding) are thematically connected when preservice elementary teachers are engaged in an assessment approximating professional noticing. We refer to this thematic linkage in this paper as coherence. Our findings suggest a complex interplay between the creation and continuation of themes when enacting professional noticing, and the quality of such noticing. 
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  5. This paper examines how 17 secondary mathematics teacher candidates (TCs) in four university teacher preparation programs implemented technology in their classrooms to teach for conceptual understanding in online, hybrid, and face to face classes during COVID-19. Using the Professional Development: Research, Implementation, and Evaluation (PrimeD) framework, TCs, classroom mentor teachers, field experience supervisors, and university faculty formed a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to discuss a commonly agreed upon problem of practice and a change idea to implement in the classroom. Through Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, participants documented their improvement efforts and refinements to the change idea and then reported back to the NIC at the subsequent monthly meeting. The Technology Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK) and the TPACK levels rubric were used to examine how teacher candidates implemented technology for Mathematics conceptual understanding. The Mathematics Classroom Observation Protocol for Practices (MCOP2) was used to further examine how effective mathematics teaching practices (e.g., student engagement) were implemented by TCs. MCOP2 results indicated that TCs increased their use of effective mathematics teaching practices. However, growth in TPACK was not significant. A relationship between TPACK and MCOP2 was not evident, indicating a potential need for explicit focus on using technology for mathematics conceptual understanding. 
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  6. Abstract

    This paper examines the implementation of an instructional module on preservice elementary teachers’ professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking. The module focuses on professional noticing skills through the content focus of early algebraic reasoning and uses complex video vignettes from whole class instruction in authentic elementary mathematics classrooms. Findings indicated that two of the three components of professional noticing (attending and interpreting) showed statistically significant increases in a treatment group that did not occur in a comparison group. The deciding component remains a challenge that warrants further research.

     
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