Browsing by Subject "Noticing"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Anxiety in the noticing and production of L2 forms: a study of beginning learners of Arabic
(2014-08) Nassif, Lama; Horwitz, Elaine Kolker, 1950-; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Schallert, Diane; Pulido , Diana; Salaberry, Maximo Rafael
This study investigated the relationship between anxiety and the noticing and integration of language forms in the learning of a less commonly taught language: Arabic. The study was motivated by the need to understand why some learners notice and integrate language forms in their second language speech better than others. Simultaneously, the study sought to understand the mechanisms through which anxiety interferes with second language speech processes. The study included a sample of 80 beginning-level learners of Arabic. The participants were assigned to two treatment conditions, Input and Output. The participants’ language anxiety was measured by the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986), and their state anxiety during the noticing and production tasks was measured by the Cognitive Interference Questionnaire (Sarason, 1978). In the treatment session, the Output group participants provided an oral description of a picture story, listened to, read, and underlined an Arabic speaker’s description, and re-described the pictures. The Input group participants answered pre-text exposure questions, listened to, read, and underlined the description, and answered post-text exposure questions. An immediate oral production posttest was administered at the end of the treatment session, and a delayed posttest was administered two weeks later. Interviews were conducted following the delayed posttest. The results showed that the noticing and integration of language forms were influenced by the type of anxiety and the nature of the forms. While language anxiety positively predicted learner noticing and integration of the language forms, state anxiety negatively predicted them. Syntactic and discourse level forms deemed more salient and of higher communicative value were more amenable to anxiety effects. No differential anxiety influences on learner noticing were detected across the Input and Output conditions. Pedagogical implications are offered in light of these findings.
Bilingual teachers reflecting on mathematics teaching : what they notice about engaging children in problem solving
(2013-05) Maldonado, Luz Angélica; Empson, Susan B.
Teachers are being asked to engage in ambitious mathematics teaching in order to reform children's mathematics learning, and it has proven to be challenging. Unraveling the challenges requires understanding the in-the-moment decisions that teachers make while teaching mathematics. The focus of this study is to understand teacher noticing, the ways in which teachers identify, reason about and make decisions in the situations that occur when engaging English language learners in problem solving. Specifically, I used the construct of professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010) to investigate what three bilingual teachers notice as they participate in a teacher study group to analyze and reflect on their experiences in weekly problem solving small groups. What teachers noticed reflected attention to situations in which they struggled to understand children's mathematical thinking and attempts to direct students towards correct problem solving. Teachers' decisions and struggles in engaging children in problem solving also revealed a focus on the role of preparing English language learners be successful for standardized testing. However, looking at student's work in the teacher study group began to help teachers focus on children's mathematical thinking. Implications on continued understanding of teacher noticing, effective mathematics professional development and developing understanding of mathematics teaching to English Language learners are discussed.
From noticing to knowledge : an analysis of teacher noticing and professional knowledge in one-on-one mathematics tutoring
(2019-05) Fliss, Rebecca Kathleen; Marshall, Jill Ann; azevedo, flavio s; salinas, cynthia s; TURNER, jack s
Tutoring is a widespread educational practice that has proven to be an effective teaching approach in many domains, including the domain of mathematics. Students who have engaged in school-based tutoring programs have outperformed their peers in numerous studies, sometimes by very large margins (Bloom, 1984; Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982; Fuchs et al., 2008; Powell, Driver, & Julian, 2015; Smith, Cobb, Farran, Cordray, & Munter, 2013). In a most notable study, Bloom (1984) showed that the average student in a tutoring group performed better than 98% of the students in a conventional group. Bloom termed this outperformance of tutored students the 2 sigma problem, stating that important research should be done to determine practical ways in which the positive effects of one-on-one tutoring, "which is too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale," can be realized in classroom settings (p. 4). This Dissertation study looks to teacher noticing as an analytical framework for understanding the practice of mathematics tutoring. The knowledge that tutors build in one-on-one tutoring interactions through the process of noticing is discussed, particularly tutors’ development of knowledge of individual students, knowledge of social and practical aspects of teaching and learning, and Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008). A new model for Knowledge for Tutoring is constructed and the widely cited Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching model is revisited. Finally, limitations and future research are discussed
What they see : noticings of secondary science cooperating teachers as they observe pre-service teachers
(2013-05) Rodriguez, Shelly R.; Barufaldi, James P.
This dissertation explores what cooperating secondary science teachers attend to during observations of pre-service teachers as they enact lessons in their classrooms and how they make sense of what they see. This study applies the teacher noticing framework, recently used in research with mathematics, to the secondary science context and uses it to describe teacher attention. The study also aims to determine if cooperating teachers use the act of noticing to engage in pedagogical reasoning and draw connections to their own teaching practice. As an interpretive qualitative study, the format for data collection and analysis utilized a case-study methodology with cross-case analysis, and used semi-structured interviews, lesson debriefs, collected artifacts, and classroom observations. Data on the four study participants was collected over the 2011-2012 school year. Findings support several conclusions. First, the cooperating science teachers in this study regularly engaged in reflection and pedagogical reasoning through the act of noticing. Second, the cooperating teachers made regular connections to their own practice in the form of vicarious suggestions, reflective questions, comparisons of practice, and perspective shifts. These connections fostered the emergence of "pivotal moments" or times when the cooperating science teacher self-identified a desire to change their current practice. Third, cooperating teachers used observations of pre-service teachers in their classrooms as a form of professional experimentation and built knowledge in practice through the experience. Lastly, the findings suggest that observations of pre-service teachers be added to the list of professional development activities, like video analysis and lesson study, that help teachers reflect on their own practice. For science teacher educators, this study demonstrates the importance of attending to field experiences as a learning opportunity for the science cooperating teacher. It provides a new way of looking at classroom observations as professional development opportunities and it recommends that teacher preparation programs reconceptualize the tasks they ask cooperating teachers to engage in. Suggestions include designing observation tools that direct teacher noticing toward student learning in science, viewing cooperating science teachers as learners, including metacognitive activities for cooperating science teachers, and reorienting lesson debriefs toward a notion of classroom inquiry.