The Feedback Teachers Provide in Mathematics Lessons and How They Provide It: Feedback Practices in Norwegian Lower Secondary Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

In this thesis, the candidate describes the oral feedback provided by teachers in mathematics lessons in Norwegian lower secondary school. The aim is to gain knowledge about the quality and quantity of oral feedback and which mathematical aspects are focused on in feedback, as well as increase our understanding of how mathematics teachers fit the feedback to the instructional situation in the lesson. The thesis is part of a classroom video study called Linking Instruction and Student Achievement (LISA). Its main data source is 172 video-recorded mathematics lessons from the school year 2014-2015 taught by 47 teachers from different schools. Article I is a study of the quality, quantity, and mathematical focus of feedback across the 172 lessons. The results were that 70 % of the teachers provided high-quality feedback during the recorded lessons and that 30 % did not. Most feedback addressed procedural skills, but conceptual feedback was also common. Feedback addressing mathematical practices was rare. Article II aims to understand how teachers successfully incorporate high-quality feedback in their teaching. It focuses on five teachers in the LISA sample that received the highest rating on PLATO’s feedback dimension. It found that conceptual feedback and feedback on mathematical practices was provided in two types of instructional situations, when working on cognitively demanding tasks and when students raise mathematical issues. These situations were characterized by being less orderly than the rest of the lesson; the students were confused, and the teacher and students did not understand each other. The article describes how the teachers and students negotiated the situations and the role that feedback played. Article III reports on how more typical lower rated teachers handled the instructional situations identified in Article II. These teachers also worked with their students on cognitively demanding tasks and remediated student issues. Their distinguishing characteristic was that they did not persist in feedback discussions when the students showed discontent or were confused. Rather, they gave procedural feedback that told students how to continue. In sum, these articles contribute knowledge about classroom feedback practices in mathematics. It uncovers a potential inequity in the quality of feedback students receive and adds understanding about how teachers with high-quality feedback practices implement these in the classroom.