Most recipients of doctorates leave universities some years after graduation, while little is known about their future non-academic career prospects. I report results from a novel microlevel database ...that links information about doctoral dissertations completed in Germany with doctorate recipients' social security records. The results, based on graduates' individual careers for five broader subject groups, indicate that postdoctoral periods do not result in a wage premium when changing to the non-academic sector.
Recent research on the professional competencies of mathematics teachers, which has been carried out during the last decade, is characterized by different theoretical approaches on the ...conceptualization and evaluation of teachers' professional competencies, namely cognitive versus situated approaches. Building on the international IEA Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) and its follow-up study, TEDS-FU, the paper compares cognitive and situated approaches on professional competencies of teachers. In TEDS-FU, the cognitive oriented framework of TEDS-M has been enriched by a situated orientation including the novice-expert framework and the noticing concept as theoretical approaches on the analyses of classroom situations. Correspondingly, the evaluation instruments were extended by using video vignettes for assessing teachers' perception, interpretation, and decision-making competencies in addition to cognitive oriented knowledge tests. The paper discusses the different kinds of theoretical frameworks and the consequences for the evaluation methods, the strengths, and weaknesses of both approaches. Furthermore, connecting the results of TEDS-FU with TEDS-M allows comprehensive insight into the structure and development of the professional competencies of mathematics teachers, the complex interplay between the different facets of teachers' competencies, and the high relevance of teaching practice for the development of these competencies. The analyses show on the one hand that both approaches—cognitive and situated—are needed for a comprehensive description of teachers' professional competencies. On the other hand, it is shown that both approaches can be integrated in a productive way. The paper closes with prospects on further studies coming even closer to the real classroom situation.
The present study examines future teachers' motivations for teaching using the FIT-Choice (Factors Influencing Teaching Choice) scale. The focus thereby is on subject interest, a factor that has ...rarely been accounted for by FIT-Choice studies although it is considered one of the most important factors to students for choosing teaching as a career. It is also assumed that students of different subject domains belong to different subcultures and therefore differ in their motivations. On the basis of n = 386 first-year, Bachelor students qualifying for lower and upper secondary schools from a large university in Germany, a latent confirmatory factor analysis shows that the FIT-Choice scale structure could be replicated and subject-specific interest was rated the most important factor by pre-service teachers. Latent path analyses reveal that students from different subject domains differ slightly in their motivations. More importantly, students who value their studied subjects' importance highly also show higher intrinsic, social-altruistic, and pedagogical motivations.
Teacher noticing has become a prominent construct in research on teacher education and professional development; however, the current state of research is quite diverse, with different theoretical ...foundations and a variety of research designs. The study described in this paper provides a systematic review of the literature on teacher noticing published over the past two decades. Based on a full-text analysis of 182 articles published in renowned databases and peer-reviewed Englishscholarly journals, the study reveals the dominance of a cognitive-psychological perspective of teacher noticing, especially in combination with qualitative studies. Although teacher noticing has been described as a holistic concept in many earlier articles, more recent studies from the last decade tend to differentiate teacher noticing into different facets. Overall, qualitative studies with small sample sizes are prevalent, which allows for fine-grained analysis but limits the generalizability of findings. This study highlights the limitations of the current discussion, such as the prevalence of teacher noticing mainly in the field of mathematics education and the low representation of work from parts of the world other than North America and Europe. In addition, the studies under consideration in this literature review are examined in depth in terms of their findings on improving teachers’ noticing through interventions and on comparisons between experts and novices, which allows for a discussion of the implications of learning to notice for teacher education and professional development.
•Full text analysis of 182 articles on the topic of teacher noticing.•Dominance of qualitative studies on noticing as theoretical foundation.•Recent studies differentiate sub-facets of noticing.•Dominance of studies with small sample sizes, which limit the generalizability of findings.•Predominance of U.S. and European studies without consideration of cultural differences.•Improvement of teacher noticing through interventions.•Expert-novice differences in teacher noticing.
In this paper we examine the relationship between teachers' knowledge, beliefs and instructional practices based on a study with 495 Chinese pre-service mathematics teachers. The results indicate ...that Chinese pre-service mathematics teachers tend to hold mixed beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and a constructivist view about mathematics teaching and learning, and that they are inclined to report that their teaching is inquiry-oriented. Mathematical content knowledge (MCK) and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) were found not to correlate with the teachers' self-reported instructional practice, in contrast to pre-service mathematics teachers' beliefs, which showed a stronger association with their self-reported inquiry-oriented instructional practice. Moreover, pre-service teachers' dynamic beliefs about the nature of mathematics, and constructivist beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning, acted as mediators between pre-service mathematics teachers' MCK, MPCK and instructional practice respectively. Author abstract
Although research on teachers’ noticing in mathematics education has significantly increased over the last decade, little is known about the relationship between teachers’ noticing and teachers’ ...knowledge as an influential basis of their professional noticing. This paper examines this relationship based on a study involving 203 in-service Chinese mathematics teachers. The results suggest that the different components of teacher knowledge influence teacher noticing differently. Among others, the sub-facets of teachers’ noticing, “interpretation and decision-making,” have a stronger correlation with teachers’ knowledge than the sub-facet “perception.” However, due to social and cultural differences between Eastern and Western countries, the study did not identify strong connections, as expected from the results of studies carried out in Western countries. Instead, rather weak overall connections between mathematics teachers’ knowledge and their noticing could be identified reflecting specific features of Chinese culture.
Teacher noticing has become increasingly acknowledged as a fundamental aspect of teacher professional competence. Teacher education scholars have examined how the development of noticing might be ...supported both in initial teacher
education and in professional development. In mathematics teacher education, several studies have explored the use of video as a supporting tool for teacher noticing. It remains unclear how this body of work builds on the various
theoretical perspectives of noticing prevalent in the literature, thus broadening our understanding of noticing. Furthermore, the field has not examined systematically the extent to which research has leveraged the affordances of digital
video technologies, and whether scholars have employed different research methods to answer questions that are critical to teacher educators. This survey paper reviews studies published in the last two decades on programs centered on
mathematics teacher noticing that used video as a supporting tool for teacher learning. Thirty-five peer-reviewed papers written in English were identified and coded along three dimensions: (1) theoretical perspectives; (2) use of video
technologies; and (3) research questions and methods. This review summarizes important findings and highlights several directions for future research. Most studies involved pre-service teachers, and only a few centered on in-service
teachers. Developers of the large majority of programs took a cognitive psychological perspective and focused on the attending/perceiving and interpreting/reasoning facets of noticing. Few studies used video-based software and few
studies used grouping, and even fewer used randomized grouping. Evidence of program effects on responding and decision making, and on instructional practice, is limited and should be extended in the future. Author abstract
The last decade has witnessed increasing interest in the study of teacher noticing in mathematics education research; however, little is known about the growth of teacher noticing and how it is ...influenced by teaching practice.
Departing from the expert-novice-paradigm, in this paper we address this research gap by a cross-sectional study that investigates how Chinese mathematics teachers' noticing is affected by their developmental stage, measured by the
length of their teaching experience. The study included 152 pre-service teachers at the end of their initial teacher education, 162 early career teachers with one to five years' teaching experience, and 123 experienced mathematics
teachers with more than 15 years' teaching experience, who participated in a video-based assessment of their noticing competency conceptualized by the sub-facets of perception, interpretation, and decision-making. Our findings indicate a
nearly linear growth in teacher noticing among Chinese mathematics teachers, with significant differences identified between pre-service and experienced teachers and only small differences between pre-service and early career teachers.
Analyses using the method of Differential Item Functioning (DIF) further suggest that pre-service and early career teachers demonstrated strengths in aspects more related to reform-oriented or Westernized approaches to mathematics
teaching, such as working with open-ended tasks, identifying characteristics of cooperative learning, and mathematical modeling tasks. By contrast, experienced teachers demonstrated strengths in perceiving students' thinking, evaluating
teachers' behavior, and analyzing students' mathematical thinking. Our findings further highlight that the three sub-facets of teacher noticing develop differently within the three participating groups of teachers. These findings suggest
that teaching experience acts as one influential factor in the development of teacher noticing in the Chinese context. Author abstract
Teacher noticing, a situation-specific part of teachers’ professional competence, has gained much importance in the past two decades. The construct is believed to play a crucial role in the transfer ...of knowledge and skills into professional teaching performance. However, there is little empirical evidence on how the length of teachers’ teaching experience affects the development of expertise in teacher noticing. In particular, little research has been conducted on the development of facets of teacher noticing—namely perception, interpretation, and decision-making—as well as the handling of cognitive demands while applying teacher noticing. To fill this research gap, the present study investigates the teacher noticing of master’s students, early-career teachers, and experienced teachers in the context of secondary mathematics via cross-sectional comparison. Teacher noticing skills and differences between the three groups are analyzed based on participants’ ability to deal with the cognitive demands of an established video-based teacher noticing instrument. The results suggest significant increases in teacher noticing from students to in-service teachers, especially in mathematic-specific areas. Hardly any significant differences were found between early-career and experienced teachers, which suggests a stagnation in teacher noticing skills. However, the early-career teachers showed better performance in decision-making and mathematics-related items as well as knowledge-based items related to recent topics from mathematics pedagogy and general pedagogy. This result emphasizes the importance of knowledge prerequisites for the development of expertise in teacher noticing. It also highlights that expertise development is not directly connected to the length of teaching experience.
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