Study To Investigate the Impact of Video-Based Intervention on Pre-Service Teachers

Assistant Professor
Rossella Santagata

Assistant Professor Rossella Santagata has received a Faculty Career Development Grant for 2009/10 to work on the project: Using Digital Video to Develop Pre-service Teachers’ Analysis of Teaching Skills: Effects on Quality of Mathematics Instruction.

Abstract

Three groups of pre-service teachers enrolled in the UCI Multi-Subject Credential program (N=90) participated last fall in a video-based intervention designed to develop their ability to analyze and learn from teaching. Various measures of pre-service teachers’ learning were collected, including a task that required participants to watch and analyze a videotaped lesson prior to and at completion of the intervention. Preliminary findings based on a sub-sample of participants show that the intervention had a positive impact on pre-service teachers’ ability to (1) attend to and reason about student thinking and learning, (2) attend to and reason about instructional strategies that make student thinking visible; and (3) propose alternative teaching strategies to those observed in the video that would improve student learning from the lesson.

The study supported by the Faculty Career Development Award aims at extending the project summarized above by investigating the impact of the video-based intervention on pre-service teachers’ beginning ability to teach mathematics in ways that are responsive to student thinking and promote conceptual understanding. The study will answer the following question: Are pre-service teachers who participated in the intervention better able to teach lessons that make student thinking visible and engage students in rich mathematical discussions than a group of pre-service teachers enrolled in the program before the intervention was offered?

The quality of teaching will be measured through the application of two coding systems. The first targets the quality of classroom discourse (Hufferd-Ackles, et al., 2004) and the second focuses on the quality of the mathematical tasks included in the lesson and the ability of the pre-service teacher to engage students in high-level reasoning (Smith, et al., 2000).

Identifying best practices for preparing teachers to teach mathematics for understanding has important implications for the improvement of U.S. mathematics teaching and of student mathematical achievement.