Using theoretical and empirical background information to affect noticing of geometrical thinking

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether exposing teachers to theoretical and empirical background information regarding pedagogical aspects of geometrical thinking would affect their noticing abilities. Forty-one in-service Mathematics teachers participated in this study. The research tools used in the study included a lesson taken from the VIDEO-LM project and articles that were all presented to the teachers. Our work with an open-ended questionnaire and mixed-methods analysis revealed that exposing in-service teachers to theoretical and empirical articles may affect the three components of their professional noticing performance: attending, interpreting, and responding. After the exposure to the articles, the teachers exhibited a greater focus on the specific difficulties inherent in the specific task at hand and their subsequent interpretations of those difficulties and responses to those difficulties were also more specific than they had been before the intervention.