Teacher noticing in Taiwan and Germany – What is the role of cultural norms regarding aspects of instructional quality?

在对教师专业知识进行了几十年的研究后，教育研究者仍然试图找到教师知识如何在课堂上有效这一主要问题的答案。鉴于教师胜任力的理论模型和越来越多的实证研究，情境技能，如教师注意，似乎在倾向和表现之间起中介作用。因此，对教师注意结构的深入研究被认为是了解专业知识以外的哪些因素对课堂表现起作用的一条有希望的途径。现有的关于教师注意的研究通常局限于单一的文化背景，因此潜在的文化影响仍然存在。特别是，这样的研究不允许确定与教学质量规范相对应的文化共享信念。然而，这种信念被认为会影响教师是否以及如何在教学情境中应用他们的专业知识。因此，本项目遵循跨文化对比的方法，使可见的文化规范影响教师在教学质量方面的注意。德国和台湾作为西方国家和东亚国家被选为对比对象。从内容上看，数学是一门国际同质学科，以避免额外的混杂差异。跨文化研究对教师注意的挑战是，关于数学课堂教学质量各方面的文化规范不仅应该起到教师注意的作用，而且还应该起到研究者对这一结构的可操作性的作用。因此，本项目的设计明确侧重于对专家规范的调查：根据两步设计，第一步，将确定关于教学质量各方面的专家规范。这些将作为第二步调查教师注意事项的参照系。关于教学质量方面的注意事项将通过文本小插页的方式进行评估。在每个国家随机抽取N=15名数学教育教授作为相应的专家。教师样本将包括每个国家/地区的N=75。这种混合方法数据分析的两步设计允许测量教师相对于专家标准注意到一个国家内的一致性和两个水平上的跨文化比较。预期结果一方面允许关于教师注意结构的可转移性和特定于文化的方面的结论。另一方面，对教育中可能对特定文化规范敏感的结构进行有效的跨文化研究的标准将被推导出来。

After decades of research on teacher professional knowledge, researchers in education still try to find answers to the major question of how teacher knowledge becomes effective in the classroom. In view of theoretical models of teacher competence as well as a growing body of empirical research, situation-specific skills such as teacher noticing appear to be mediating between disposition and performance. Hence, in-depth investigation on the construct of teacher noticing is seen as a promising approach to gain insight into which factors beyond professional knowledge play a role for classroom performance. Existing research on teacher noticing is usually restricted to a single cultural context and thus potential cultural influences remain implicit. In particular, such research does not allow identifying culturally shared beliefs corresponding to norms regarding instructional quality. It is however assumed that such beliefs affect if and how teachers apply their professional knowledge in instructional situations. Consequently, this project follows a cross-cultural contrasting approach to make visible cultural norms that influence teacher noticing regarding aspects of instructional quality. Germany and Taiwan were chosen for the contrast as a Western and an East-Asian country. In terms of contents, mathematics as an internationally homogeneous discipline is focused to avoid additional confounding variance.A challenge of cross-cultural research on teacher noticing is that cultural norms regarding aspects of instructional quality in the mathematics classroom are not only expected to play a role for teacher noticing, but also for the researchers’ operationalizations of the construct. Consequently, the design of this project puts an explicit focus on the investigation of expert norms: According to a two-step design, in the first step, expert norms regarding aspects of instructional quality will be determined. These will be used as a frame of reference for investigating teacher noticing in the second step. Noticing regarding aspects of instructional quality will be assessed by means of text-vignettes. A random sample of N=15 professors in mathematics education in each country is considered as corresponding experts. The teacher sample will include N=75 in each country. This two-step design with mixed-methods data analyses allows measuring teacher noticing relatively to expert norms in terms of consistency within a country and cross-cultural comparisons on two levels. Expected results allow on the one hand conclusions regarding transferable and culture-specific aspects of the teacher noticing construct. On the other hand criteria for valid cross-cultural research on constructs in education which may be sensitive to culture-specific norms will be deduced.