Page 127 - Children’s mathematical development and learning needs in perspective of teachers’ use of dynamic math interviews

Effect of dynamic math interviews on mathematics teaching
The pretests and posttests were comprised of video-recordings – one taken before and a second, at the end, of the teacher professional development program. These video-recordings were handed in to the researcher.
To assess mathematics teaching behavior, mathematics lessons given by each teacher were observed and video-recorded on four occasions. The lesson topic – either fractions or proportions – was determined in advance. The video-recordings were scored using ICALT+S observations consisting of 40 items with 4-point Likert scales ranging from 1 (= predominantly weak) to 4 (= predominantly strong). The scoring of full lessons was done by the first author and a second observer, both trained and certified to use ICALT. The inter-rater reliability for live scoring was good (0.86).
The TSES and TSMKTQ were sent to the participating teachers by e-mail. A direct link was embedded in the web-based questionnaire services in Formdesk. Teachers were asked to complete the questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of each school year; reminders were sent on each occasion. The response rate was 100% and all data collected from all 23 teachers was included in the subsequent analyses.
Data analyses
To address the first research question, the effect of a teacher professional development program on the quality of dynamic math interviews, we conducted paired samples t-tests (2-tailed). We controlled for multiple testing using the Bonferroni correction (see Table 1).
We checked normality using Shapiro Wilk, which is more appropriate for small sample sizes. The following outliers were computed: questions to identify children’ instructional needs, questions to identify children’ content and method needs, reduced complexity support, verbal support, material support and support using representations. Because the final analysis was not affected by inclusion or exclusion of these data, we left it in.
To examine the effect of the intervention on teacher factors, research question 2, we conducted three repeated-measures ANOVAs– actual mathematics teaching behavior and teachers’ perceived mathematics
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