Examining Mathematics Teachers Noticing the Rationality: Scenario-Based Training with AI Chatbot

Abstract

It is essential that students are encouraged to become rational thinkers for building thinking classrooms. Teachers must adopt rational questioning techniques to facilitate the development of rational behaviours in their students. However, the implementation of rational questioning requires the ability to respond to students based on their performance, thereby requiring teacher noticing in the context of rationality. In this study, we adopt teacher noticing in the context of three components of rationality (epistemic, teleological, and communicative) and demonstrate the potential of ChatGPT to monitor teachers’ noticing the rationality. In this context, we conducted scenario-based training with three in-service mathematics teachers using ChatGPT. Participants were presented with a scenario involving a common difficulty related to the concept of slope and were asked to engage in an interactive session with ChatGPT. We then conducted individual interviews to gain insight into their noticing the rationality. Our findings clearly pointed to a tendency among the teachers to focus on the epistemic and teleological aspects of ChatGPT’s response, with no engagement in communicative decision-making. ChatGPT provided the opportunity to determine the cases in which the teacher could not attend and interpret the rationality and decide for rational questioning. Based on these findings, we suggest that ChatGPT could be used as a tool for monitoring teacher noticing the rationality in teacher education.