Abstract:

One of the objectives of the Erasmus+ coReflect@maths project is the design and evaluation of vignette-based courses for pre-service teachers. A vignette is understood as a representation of a classroom situation (Buchbinder & Kuntze, 2018), for example, a transcription of students’ answers to a problem or an interaction between a teacher and different students solving a problem and they can be presented in different formats such as text, cartoon or video. Vignettes provide pre-service teachers with real-life contexts to reflect on and analyze different aspects of the teaching and learning of mathematics. In other words, these representations of classroom situations provide opportunities to link the theoretical ideas with their practice as teachers (Ivars et al., 2020). With the focus on developing pre-service primary school teachers’ noticing of geometric teaching situations, a vignette-based course has been designed, implemented and evaluated. The course involved five vignettes (four cartoon vignettes and a text written vignette focused on a textbook page) and had a duration of five sessions (with two hours each). Pre-service teachers had to analyze the vignettes, collaboratively in small groups, answering some guiding questions that helped them focus their attention on interpreting students’ geometrical thinking, analyzing activities from textbooks, anticipating students’ answers or analyzing student-teacher interactions solving an activity. Pre-service teachers had to use a theoretical document with features of student’s geometrical thinking development. The vignette-based course was implemented with a group of pre-service primary school teachers at the University of Alicante. To evaluate the designed vignette-based course, we used a questionnaire where pre-service teachers had to select to what extent they agree with statements presented in 20 items. The items evaluate how they perceived the relevance, authenticity, immersion, motivation and experience with the vignettes. In this paper, we present the design of one of these vignettes and the results obtained from the questionnaire to evaluate the vignette-based course.

Acknowledgements:
The project coReflect@maths (2019-1-DE01-KA203-004947) is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

References:
[1] Buchbinder, O., & Kuntze, S. (Eds.). (2018). Mathematics Teachers Engaging with Representations of Practice. A Dynamically Evolving Field. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70594-1
[2] Ivars, P. et al. (2020). A digital tool to support teachers’ collaborative reflection on mathematics classroom situations: The Erasmus+ Coreflect@maths project. In L. Gómez Chova, A. López Martínez, & I. Candel Torres (Eds.), 13th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (pp. 3661-3667). IATED. https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2020

Keywords:

Pre-service teachers' noticing, vignettes, geometrical thinking, vignette-based course.