Exploring the Roles of Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teacher Noticing: An Expert–Novice Comparative Study

Abstract

This exploratory study examined the theoretically assumed, but empirically underexplored, reciprocal relationships between teacher noticing and professional knowledge by comparing the noticing processes of expert and novice science teachers. It examined how their domain-specific knowledge (content knowledge [CK] and pedagogical content knowledge [PCK]) influenced these processes. A video-based interview was conducted with 15 preservice and 12 expert science teachers to elicit and approximate their noticing processes, including perception, interpretation, and proposed instructional responses to atypical student thinking. The quantitative analysis revealed that experts more often evaluated teacher pedagogy and classroom activities, interpreted student thinking and referenced science content in their comments. They also more readily proposed content-specific next instructional moves linked to students' content-specific thinking. The qualitative analysis showed that novices relied mainly on their CK to evaluate student thinking, while experts' CK and PCK supported their more nuanced analysis of student thinking. Moreover, while novices' limited PCK hindered their ability to evaluate teacher pedagogy and classroom activities, as well as to propose subsequent instructional moves, experts' deeper CK and PCK enabled more content-specific evaluations and proposals for instructional moves. Novices tended to emulate the teacher's approaches in the videos, while some experts engaged in knowledge-building, proposing new instructional strategies after noticing the limitations of the teacher's strategies for conveying specific scientific ideas. We conclude that experts, unlike novices, notice teaching interactions as a dynamic interplay among teachers, students, and science content, rather than simply focusing on teacher actions. We discuss the implications of these findings for science teacher education.