Teacher noticing in science education: do you see what I see?

In recent years, teacher noticing has emerged as a construct to capture the dynamic and situational aspects of teaching expertise that underlies teachers’ in-the-moment teaching decisions and actions. In mathematics education research, in particular, teacher noticing has been studied to understand how teachers attend to, and make sense of, students’ mathematical thinking and reasoning. This construct has recently found its way into the science education literature. This paper reviews how the construct of teacher noticing has been understood and empirically investigated in the science education literature. We reviewed 29 empirical studies that focused on science teachers’ noticing and analysed how teacher noticing was defined and conceptualised in terms of its constituent components in these studies as well as the range of approaches used to investigate teacher noticing. Our analysis highlights how the original understanding of, and underlying assumptions about, teacher noticing have shifted as the construct has been imported into the science education literature. This review raises issues related to the investigation of teacher noticing and discusses how the findings of these studies can advance our existing knowledge of science teaching expertise. Finally, we propose directions for future research in this emerging field of research.