2017 Volume 40 Issue 4 Pages 241-251
In this study, we explore teachers’ cognition in teaching that affects reflection-in-action. By use of a photographic slides method developed by Carter et al.(1988), we asked 31 elementary school teachers to view a sequence of slides about one social studies lesson and report what slide they saw as a important or problematic situation and its reason. The main findings are as follows: as teachers get more experienced, they tend to attend to more reliable information from classroom events in terms of students’ emotional state, interpret a situation in relation to previous events, and make sense of a situation based on expectation about student response, referring to a lesson plan. However, this study also suggests that there are individual differences in meaning making of a situation that are unaffected by teaching experience. Finally we offer recommendations about future researches on teachers’ reflection-in-action based on their cognition.
