A Dialogue-Based Analysis of Physics Teachers' Noticing of Students’ Conceptual Knowledge and Reasoning

Date

2026-2-20

Author

Köksalan, Simay

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

94
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This phenomenographic study examines qualitative variation in physics teachers’ noticing of students’ conceptual knowledge and reasoning in the topic of heat and temperature. 68 in-service teachers in Ankara responded in writing to a Dialogue-Based Teacher Noticing Instrument consisting of an 80-line hypothetical classroom dialogue and three open-ended prompts targeting the facets of attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond. A purposive subsample of 10 teachers participated in semi-structured interviews used for clarification and member checking. Written responses were segmented into meaning units and analyzed iteratively to generate categories of description and an outcome space that maps qualitative variation and visualizes pathways between the facets. Findings show that teachers attended to student ideas through three dimensions: specific content, cognitive elements and reasoning processes, and scientific consistency. Teachers’ interpretations diversified into evaluative and diagnostic, epistemic, metacognitive, and affective orientations, with subcategories. Decisions about responding were grouped into instructional, elaborative, and supportive moves, while a portion of attended selections were followed by no explicit interpretation or by no stated decision. The outcome space and pathway visualizations show how interpretive orientations channel into different response repertoires and where discontinuities occur between facets. Overall, the study provides a fine-grained, topic-specific account of teacher noticing in science education by linking what teachers notice to how they interpret and how they decide to act. It also offers implications for teacher education and professional development that foreground evidence-based interpretation and responsive decision-making in conceptually challenging domains.

Subject Keywords

Teacher Noticing, Conceptual knowledge and reasoning, Heat and temperature, Physics teachers, Phenomenography

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118776

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis