Breanna Rawlins
Research Mentor: Amanda Brown
Mentor Department: Educational Studies, Education
Author(s): Breanna Rawlins, Amanda Brown, Rüya Savuran, Qiuyu Chen, Patricio Herbst
Session: Session 5 (2:00 PM – 2:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 89
Abstract
Teachers’ perceptions of student work play a critical role in shaping the type and quality of feedback they provide, yet prior research offers limited insight into how specific features of student work influence these responses. Building on established frameworks that describe how teachers interpret student contributions (Herbst et al., 2023) and how they enact instructional responses (Milewski & Strickland, 2020), this study examines whether teacher responses align with their perceptions of student work. The purpose of this research is to identify patterns that connect the nature of students’ work with the instructional moves teachers make. To ground our analysis, we draw on Herbst et al.’s (2023) four categories of perception: correctness, responsiveness to the problem, serviceability to lesson goals, and normativity with respect to the lesson’s framing. These categories provide a structured lens for examining how teachers notice, interpret, and value particular features of student reasoning. Together with Milewski and Strickland’s (2020) framework for characterizing instructional responses, they offer a coherent theoretical foundation for analyzing the relationship between teachers’ perceptions and their subsequent feedback. Using a thematic analytical approach, we examine written teacher responses to a curated set of student work samples. This method supports a data-driven interpretation of the motives and reasoning guiding teachers’ instructional decisions. Our ongoing analysis aims to clarify how teachers prioritize different aspects of student work and how these priorities may shape their feedback practices, contributing to a deeper understanding of how instructional decisions are influenced by subject-specific perceptions of student reasoning.
