“It Depends …”: Using Ambiguities to Better Understand Mathematics Teachers’ Decision-making

Abstract

The concept of teacher noticing has been a powerful methodological tool for understanding teachers’ decision-making and professional judgment. In this line of inquiry, researchers usually try to identify elements of classroom practice salient to teachers. Data about teacher noticing and decision making can be collected at scale through the use of scenario-based instruments, but these instruments have been described in the literature as inherently ambiguous because they do not contain all the information necessary to make a decision. We contribute to understanding this ambiguity so as to help connect teacher noticing to their professional judgment by introducing the concept of conditional construals—moments when teachers require additional context in order to judge whether a given teaching action is appropriate. Furthermore, we locate conditional construals in a large corpus of responses to scenario-based items by identifying occurrences of a linguistic marker. Our identification of these moments allows us to study the type of reasoning (analytical or intuitive) evoked by these scenarios and gives us insight into the information teachers require to make decisions.