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.

Against a backdrop of advocacy for interdisciplinary STEM curricula, this paper explores the design principles underpinning a three-year longitudinal research project that develops and evaluates interdisciplinary mathematics and science learning sequences involving multiple teachers and student cohorts across the primary school years. The research uses design-based methodology and deploys a pedagogical cycle based on representation construction and model-based reasoning, reflecting core disciplinary processes, and aimed at foundational concepts. The interdisciplinary structure of sequences in different topics, teacher pedagogy, and student reasoning and learning are illustrated through analysis of three learning sequence vignettes. In these topics both mathematical learning (measure, data modelling and spatial reasoning) and science learning (concepts and practices), were reinforced and enriched through the interdisciplinary framing. Drawing on notes of teacher planning and review meetings, coupled with classroom data, we identify (a) the conceptual and curricular design features through which mathematics and science can synergistically interweave, (b) the epistemological design challenges involved in working with teachers to achieve this interdisciplinary alignment, and (c) the key pedagogical design features that emerged to support this integration. The research contributes to conceptualising how interdisciplinary processes that enable synergistic interweaving of mathematics and science content and processes can be effectively framed and enacted.

Growing research evidence indicates student learning gains from guided representation construction/invention in school science and mathematics. In this inquiry approach, students address challenges around what features of a phenomenon/problem to attend to, what data to collect, how and why, and make collective judgments about multimodal accounts of phenomena. However, researchers to date have tended to focus on student learning rather than on the teacher’s role in guiding various phases of inquiry. In this paper we report on (a) analysis of Grade 1 students’ engagement in interdisciplinary mathematics and science inquiry practices in a classroom sequence in ecology; (b) the teacher’s role in guiding such inquiry; and (c) interpretation of these practices in terms of support of student transduction (connecting and remaking meanings across representations in different modes). Data from our study included video capture of two case study teachers’ guidance of tasks and classroom discussion and student artefacts. We examine the classroom processes through which the teachers used students’ invention and revision of data displays to teach the concepts of living things, diversity, distribution and adaptive features related to habitat in science. Mathematical processes included constructing and interpreting mapping, measurement and data modelling, sampling and using a scale. The analysis offers fresh insights into how teachers support student learning in these two subjects, through discrete stages of orienting, representation challenge, building consensus and applying and extending representational systems.