How Teaching Experience and Physics and Mathematics Content Knowledge Impact Professional Noticing Skills of STEM Graduate Students

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.