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An exploratory study of the relation between teachers’ implicit theories and teacher noticing

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Abstract

Despite interest in how students’ implicit theories—their growth and fixed mindsets about their own learning—affect students as learners, relatively little research on mindset has looked at teachers as learners. This study explores elementary teachers’ implicit theories about the malleability of mathematics intelligence and teaching ability. It also examines how implicit theories of learning relate to teacher noticing, a construct that has been linked to teachers’ classroom practice and their students’ learning outcomes. Findings from the present investigation indicate that teachers generally reported growth mindsets concerning mathematics intelligence and teaching ability. For both mathematics intelligence and teaching ability, teachers’ reporting of more growth—compared to more fixed—mindsets was associated with more expert noticing, as measured by comments they wrote about elementary mathematics video clips on the dimensions of mathematics and student thinking. These findings point to intriguing possibilities about whether fostering growth mindsets (of mathematics intelligence and of teaching ability) in professional development settings might be leveraged to promote expert teacher noticing.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available at https://go.illinois.edu/JMTE_Data.

Code availability

Not applicable.

Notes

  1. We thank an astute reviewer for pointing out an important connection to theoretical framing.

  2. Of course, as Goodwin’s (1994) original analysis of professional vision in the context of policing suggested, the development of a socialized professional vision does not always ensure good or equitable practices, and in fact an unexamined professional vision can lead to poor practice.

  3. To do this, we had to reverse code the scores and then log-transform the scale, since the log transformation will spread out the lower values and compress higher values. This is simply a technical note, as we present all of the results with growth mindset being at the top end of the scale, corresponding to the presentation in the figures and with the original way the scale is described by Dweck.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. 1621253. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Discovery Partners Institute, University of Illinois System, Chicago, IL, USA

    Meg S. Bates & Shereen Oca Beilstein

  2. Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Joseph R. Cimpian

  3. University of Chicago STEM Education, Chicago, IL, USA

    Cheryl Moran

  4. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Kate Curry, Genevieve M. Henricks & Michelle Perry

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Victoria Jay

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  1. Meg S. Bates
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Bates, M.S., Cimpian, J.R., Beilstein, S.O. et al. An exploratory study of the relation between teachers’ implicit theories and teacher noticing. J Math Teacher Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-023-09617-z

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