Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning. Despite…

Knowing how science teachers develop their professional knowledge has been a challenge. One potential way to determine the professional knowledge of teachers is through videos. In the study described here, the authors recruited 60 elementary and secondary science teachers, showed them one of two 10-min videos, and recorded and analyzed their…

Ability to adequately analyze educational situations is essential not only for (pre-service) teachers' occupational decisions, but also for their own professional development. This study represents an evaluation of the observation practice aimed at pre-service chemistry teachers' (N = 12) professional vision development. They attended chemistry…

Although the chemical literature contains many studies of multimedia-based learning and teacher enthusiasm, there is a paucity of research on whether and to what extent teacher enthusiasm in video lectures affects students' learning, especially in chemistry. In this context, this mixed-method study used eye tracking and quantitative analysis to…

Digital video technology has been increasingly employed to investigate teacher professional noticing. While extensive research has been undertaken to explore the specialised knowledge base underlying teacher professional noticing, there is a need to more closely examine the methodological consequences of video-based approaches for understanding…

Although research and policy suggest science and mathematics teachers should attend to their student's thinking during instruction, our field has inadequately defined what that means in relation to our ultimate goals for the practice. Here I present a theoretical argument that, in making their definitions, researchers should leverage the ways…

Although there is substantial research on the effect of emotions on educational outcomes in the classroom, relatively little is known about how emotion affects learning in informal science contexts. We examined the role of emotion in the context of an informal science learning experience by utilizing a path model to investigate the relationships…

Engaging students in class is paramount if they are to gain a deep understanding of class content. Student engagement is manifested by attention to the various components of instruction. However, there is little research at the tertiary level focusing on what aspects of instruction are related to changes in student attention during class. To…

This mixed-methods study analysed over 200 interviews from 20 seventh-grade students with learning disabilities (LD). Students were instructed how to use a note-taking intervention during science lectures. The interview analyses were supported by pre- and post-intervention quantitative data. Data suggest that the intervention helped students…

The theoretical construct of teacher noticing has allowed mathematics teacher educators to examine teacher thinking and practice by looking at the range of activities that teachers notice in the classroom. Guided by this approach to the study of teacher thinking, the central goal of this exploratory study was to identify what prospective science…

This case study examines the role of playful talk in negotiating the "how" of collaborative group work in a 6th-grade science classroom. Here we develop and test a Vygotsky-derived hypothesis that postulates playful talk as a mechanism for identity exploration and group status negotiation. Our findings indicate that students utilized the…