Source: Journal of Teacher Education, Volume: 72 issue: 3, page(s): 284-297
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This article reports on the application of a new technology (360 video) to represent professional practice.
The 360 video format differs from traditional video in that it records a spherical view of a scenario.
Using either a flat screen or virtual reality (VR) headset, a preservice teacher (PST) can adjust the field-of-view by moving the screen with a mouse/finger-tap or turning their head in a headset.
The few identified studies examining 360 video use in teacher education have found PSTs report a higher sense of immersion and presence (Roche & Gal-Petitfaux, 2017; Walshe & Driver, 2019).
An ensuing question is whether a higher sense of immersion translates into improved situational awareness, which, in turn, could signify higher precision in PSTs’ professional noticing.
The purpose of this study is to examine whether and how the use of 360 video affects PSTs’ professional noticing for elementary mathematics.
This study focuses specifically on PSTs’ attending within the construct of professional noticing (Levin et al., 2009; van Es & Sherin, 2002).
Teachers’ professional noticing is a form of situation awareness.
As defined by Endsley (2000), situation awareness involves understanding what is occurring in a given scenario, while also understanding what is significant in such scenarios.
What is of interest to the present study is whether a PST’s noticing habits can be improved upon in teacher training, and research comparing experienced and novice teachers can provide some insights into this phenomenon.
The purpose of this study is to examine the specificity of pedagogy and content noticed by PSTs in the context of perceptual capacity and embodied interaction.
The study seeks to answer the following research questions:
1: How do PSTs’ articulated noticing differ when viewing a standard video, 360 video on a laptop, or 360 video with a VR headset?
2: Is there a difference where (spatially) PSTs attend when viewing a 360 video on a laptop versus with a VR headset?
The first research question seeks to examine whether increased perceptual capacity interacts with the specificity PSTs attend to mathematics in a classroom scenario.
The second question focuses on the potential effects of embodied interaction.
Method
This study incorporated a convergent mixed-methods approach in which qualitative and quantitative data were collected within the same phase of study, analyzed separately, and then merged for interpretation.
Participants provided written accounts of what they noticed when viewing each representation of practice, and this was analyzed qualitatively using constant comparative analysis (CCA; Fram, 2013).
In addition, participants’ initial viewing of the 360 videos (either on a laptop or with a headset) were recorded as count data, signifying the number of 15-s intervals they focused on sections of the classroom.
These count data were analyzed using nonparametric statistics.
Both qualitative and quantitative data were merged to look for patterns across data types.
Given the nature of convergent mixed-methods designs, both qualitative and quantitative data received equal prioritization.
Participants
Participants included 33 PSTs enrolled in an early childhood education program (pre-K–3) at a Midwestern U.S. institution.
All participants were enrolled in the first semester of their senior year (preceding full-time student teaching) in the second of two mathematics methods courses.
Whereas the first course focused on number sense, place value, and geometry, the second course focused more on multiplicative reasoning, fractions, and measurement.
Thus, participants were enrolled in a course related to content within the video they watched.
Following recruitment, the authors used responses to the poll on availability to create a set of sessions, and then randomly assigned sessions to one of three conditions: the standard laptop condition (n = 8), the 360 laptop condition (n = 11), and the 360 headset condition (n = 14).
Procedure
PSTs who participated in this study (n = 33) completed a 30-min teacher noticing activity outside program and course requirements.
Participants in each condition met in separate sessions but completed the same materials with differing viewing conditions.
In addition to the data collected from PSTs’ written noticing, participants’ screen views in both the 360 laptop and 360 headset conditions were recorded to account for potential variation in how the perspectives were adjusted.
Specifically, as 360 video allows the viewer to choose where to position the video view, the authors recorded this interaction to study where PSTs chose to position the camera perspective when watching the video on their first viewing.
Qualitative Analysis
CCA was incorporated to examine PSTs’ written responses, with particular attention to PSTs’ written noticing and accompanying rationales for these choices.
In the present study, the authors used elicited documents in the form of PSTs’ written responses regarding pivotal moments they noticed or anticipated noticing (in the case of the prompt following familiarization with the task).
Following guidelines from Charmaz (2014) and Fram (2013), the PSTs’ written responses were coded.
Finally, they engaged in additional rounds of coding to solidify an understanding of the emergent themes.
Quantitative Analysis
The authors used nonparametric statistics to examine trends in where PSTs looked when watching the 360 laptop and 360 headset scenarios.
To create a quantitative data set representative of where PSTs attended, they created a simple coding protocol.
Codings represent count data signifying whether a participant spent the majority of an interval viewing the scenario at a particular partition (back-left, front-left, front, back-right, front-right, or indeterminate).
In sum, 22 PSTs’ recordings were coded, representing 616 intervals.
Findings and discussion
Digital innovations continue to change opportunities for teaching and learning, including efforts to improve the authenticity of representations of practice.
In this study, the authors examined whether and how 360 video technology affects PSTs’ professional noticing in the context of an elementary mathematics lesson.
Findings revealed that PSTs using 360 video attended to more student actions in their written noticings, with more descriptive references to such actions than PSTs who viewed a standard video of the same scenario.
This occurred for both reform-oriented and content-specific noticings.
In addition, when PSTs used a headset rather than a laptop to view the scenario, they attended to different areas of the recorded classroom, leading to increased specificity in descriptions of the mathematics at hand.
Given that all participants in the present study are PSTs with the same relative professional experience, findings of the present study are highly significant. Specifically, there is extensive evidence suggesting that as teachers gain more experience, they attend to more student actions, write lengthier descriptions, and attend to more specific aspects of the pedagogical content in recorded scenarios (Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Huang & Li, 2012). The current study’s findings seem to suggest that use of 360 video has the potential to significantly improve the quality of PSTs’ professional noticing. Yet, there are relatively few analyses of teacher noticing in the context of 360 video (Walshe & Driver, 2019) and this study is the first to compare teachers’ professional noticing across standard and 360 video viewing mediums. So, although the authors believe that the results provide important implications for teacher education, they also caution against making too bold of claims about use of 360 video in teacher education without additional, future research.
Prior research suggests that teachers with more experience notice more student actions with more sophisticated description of those actions (Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Huang & Li, 2012; Jacobs et al., 2010).
Although the magnitude of difference is smaller, the authors observed a similar distinction between PSTs who viewed standard video versus those who viewed 360 video.
Likewise, the difference in content-specificity of PSTs’ noticings between the 360 laptop and 360 headset conditions resembled observed differences in teachers’ noticings of procedural versus conceptual aspects of content (Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Ross & Gibson, 2010).
This study provides empirical evidence that using 360 video, instead of standard video, has the potential to improve the quality and depth of PSTs’ professional noticing.
Furthermore, using headsets may improve the specificity to which they attend to pedagogical concepts in recorded scenarios.
These outcomes suggest that 360 video may hold promise for improving teacher education.
It is, therefore, worthy of continued exploration and implementation.
Yet, as articulated throughout this discussion, more research is needed to better understand how and when this medium can best be used in teacher education, and how teacher educators and educational researchers can develop and study best practices for this emerging technology.
References
Barnhart, T., & van Es, E. (2015). Studying teacher noticing: Examining the relationship among pre-service science teachers’ ability to attend, analyze and respond to student thinking. Teaching and Teacher Education, 45, 83–93
Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). SAGE.
Endsley, M. R. (2000). Theoretical underpinnings of situation awareness. In M. R. Endsley & D. J. Garland (Eds.), Situation awareness analysis and measurement (pp. 1–21). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Fram, S. M. (2013). The constant comparative analysis method outside of grounded theory. Qualitative Report, 18, 1–25.
Huang, R., & Li, Y. (2012). What matters most: A comparison of expert and novice teachers’ noticing of mathematics classroom events. School Science and Mathematics, 112(7), 420–432.
Jacobs, V. R., Lamb, L. L. C., & Philipp, R. A. (2010). Professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(2), 169–202.
Levin, D. M., Hammer, D., & Coffey, J. E. (2009). Novice teachers’ attention to student thinking. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(2), 142–154
Roche, L., & Gal-Petitfaux, N. (2017). Using 360° video in physical education teacher education. In P. Resta & S. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 3420–3425). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
Ross, P., & Gibson, S. A. (2010). Exploring a conceptual framework for expert noticing during literacy instruction. Literacy Research and Instruction, 49(2), 175–193.
van Es, E., & Sherin, M. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–596.
Walshe, N., & Driver, P. (2019). Developing reflective trainee teacher practice with 360-degree video. Teaching and Teacher Education, 78, 97–105.