Teachers Can Learn to Attend to Students’ Reasoning Using Videos as a Tool

Abstract

We report on research in teacher education that addresses the need for teachers to attend more carefully to students’ mathematical reasoning in accordance with recently adopted Standards. Interventions were implemented in which groups of pre-service and in-service teachers worked on mathematical tasks and then studied videos of children working on those same tasks. Results from quasi-experimental studies show highly significant growth in attending to mathematical arguments for all three sub-groups of experimental participants (K-8 in-service, K-5 pre-service, and secondary pre-service), in contrast to comparison groups. This research holds promise for others to adopt and adapt similar interventions that use the videos, tasks and related resources that are publicly available through the Video Mosaic Collaborative (www.videomosaic.org).