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Although raised in the early days of research on teacher noticing, the question of context specificity has remained largely unanswered to this day. In this study, we build on our prior research on a specific aspect of noticing, namely teachers’ analysis of how representations are dealt with in mathematics classroom situations. For the purpose of such analysis, we examined the role of context on the levels of mathematical content area and classroom situation. Using a vignette-based test instrument with 12 classroom situations from the content areas of fractions and functions, we investigated how teachers’ analyses regarding the use of representations are related concerning these two mathematical content areas. Beyond content areas, we were interested in the question of whether an overarching unidimensional competence construct can be inferred from the participants’ analyses of the different individual classroom situations. The 12 vignettes were analysed by N = 175 secondary mathematics teachers with different degrees of teaching experience and their written answers provided the data for this study. Our findings show that the data fit the Rasch model and that all classroom situations contributed in a meaningful way to the competence under investigation. There was no significant effect of the mathematical content area on the participants’ analyses regarding the use of multiple representations. The results of the study indicate that explicitly considering questions of context can strengthen research into teacher noticing.
As an important component of teaching expertise, teacher noticing is gaining growing attention in our intercultural mathematics education community. However, it is likely that in many cases the researchers’ perspectives on what characterizes high instructional quality in mathematics classrooms shape what they expect teachers to notice. In particular, it is an open question how potentially different norms of instructional quality influence how teacher noticing is operationalized in East Asian and Western cultures. Consequently, in a first step, this bicultural research project on teacher noticing in Taiwan and Germany focuses on exploring the researchers’ frames of reference for investigating teacher noticing. In this paper, we thus propose a concurrent process for developing vignettes and eliciting corresponding expert norms as a prerequisite to investigating teacher noticing in a way that is sensitive to different cultural contexts. In this process, the research teams in both countries developed in parallel, text vignettes in which, from their perspective, a breach of a norm regarding a specific aspect of instructional quality was integrated. In an online expert survey, these vignettes were then presented to German and Taiwanese researchers in mathematics education (19 from each country) to investigate whether these experts recognize the integrated breach of a norm. This approach allows researchers to identify potentially different norms of instructional quality in mathematics classrooms. In particular, by means of a specific representation of practice, it became visible how expert norms of responding to students’ mathematical thinking can be different from a Taiwanese compared to a German perspective.