Primary School Teachers’ Noticing Skills Regarding Students’ Thinking The Case of Whole Number Subtraction

Abstract

This qualitative case study aims to investigate how and to which extent primary school teachers notice students’ mathematical thinking in the context of whole number subtraction. A task involving a student’s invented strategy was used to collect data. Three noticing questions connected to the task was asked to 45 teachers and their written answers were analyzed to reveal teachers' noticing skills based on attending, interpreting and deciding how to respond. The results of study revealed that most of the teachers provided lack and limited evidence of attending and interpreting skills. More specifically, they could not identify the relationship between numbers in ones and tens place and their interpretations were not directly to the student’s solution and consisted of general statements and misconceptions. Parallel to this, majority of teachers ignored the student’s thinking, displayed misconceptions about the knowledge of teaching subtraction, gave unrelated or too general responses and revisited traditional algorithm.