Teachers’ Noticing Mathematics Within Imprecise Instructional Explanations

Research has identified teacher noticing of instructional explanations as a topic that rarely appears in the mathematics education literature and thus requires further exploration. Our study focuses on this issue by directing teachers to attend to the mathematics of explanations presented in a “teacher’s voice”. These explanations were designed to include implicit assumptions and vague or informal language. Preservice teachers ( \(n=31\) $n=31$ ) examined these explanations in terms of mathematical rigour, revised them if necessary, and shared their rationale for the revisions in a written format. We framed our analysis by reinterpreting Jacobs et al.’s (2010) conceptualization of teacher noticing and Mason’s (1998) notion of awareness. The findings show that preservice teachers noticed language-related issues more often than implicit assumptions and demonstrated varying levels of awareness while responding to the mathematical issues.