The Skills of Mathematics Teachers with Different Professional Experiences to Notice the Evidence of Student Thinking

There are different types of evidence that reflect students' thinking in classroom

interactions. Student discourse, gestures, actions can be shown among these. The

aim of the current study is to reveal the skills of secondary mathematics teachers

with different professional experiences to notice different types of evidence of

student thinking. For this aim, the study was designed within the context of a

case study, one of the qualitative research methods. The data of the study were

obtained through video-based interviews with five secondary mathematics

teachers. Six video episodes containing different types of evidence for videobased interviews were shown to teachers. In the interviews, targeted questions

were asked to reveal what types of evidence the participating teachers took into

account in the videos they watched, how they interpret these types of evidence,

and what kind of instructional decisions they suggested. The types of evidence

that teachers noticed in the videos and how they made sense of the evidence

were analyzed qualitatively. Various findings have been revealed depending on

the different professional experiences of the teachers. First, experienced (5 years

and above) teachers paid more attention to the types of verbal evidence of

student thinking. Student statements and questions were more visible to

experienced teachers, especially among oral evidence. Second, the evidencebased comments described by the experienced teachers were aimed at drawing

more conclusions. However, it is noteworthy that teachers who make inferences

based on student's cognitive thinking also attend postgraduate education or

professional experience courses. Third, the instructional decisions of

experienced teachers who attended postgraduate education and professional

experience courses, based on student thinking, were mostly related to specific

mathematical subjects