LAUSR

Human beings have the innate ability to notice the events that occur in the environment around. Whereas this ability appears to be mundane and ordinary, it has received growing attention from educational researchers and practitioners alike who tend to view it from a conceptual and methodical perspective. In classrooms, teachers do notice something happen and yet ignore other things. Teacher noticing generally refers to what teachers observe and how they make sense of their observations to respond to classroom situations. There is a general consensus that teacher noticing involves three inter-rated processes and skills: attending, interpreting, and deciding (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010). Teacher noticing is also found to be highly contextual and interdependent and can take place both in a top-down and a bottom-up manner (Sherin & Russ, 2015). As its name suggests, teachers are the primary focus of teacher noticing research and yet research contributions in this area in relation to teaching, learning, policy, and practice in mathematics education have been widely demonstrated. For teachers, learning to engage in productive noticing is considered an important instructional skill (Huang & Li, 2012). For students, they show better mathematical understanding from the adaptive practice of teachers who understand their thinking through noticing (Sun & van Es, 2015). Teachers who notice the dynamic working in their classrooms are more ready to make and implement policy that creates favorable conditions for student learning (Star, Lynch, & Perova, 2011). Teacher noticing has been a recognized component of expert practice that allows teachers to develop sensitivities toward certain aspects of their work relevant to their practice (Mason, 2002). Despite all these research efforts, as a relatively new area of inquiry in mathematics education, there are still many unanswered research questions that merit further empirical investigation. This special issue focuses on studies that report teacher noticing for advancing our understanding of teaching, learning, policy, and practice in mathematics education. We are particularly interested in studies that examine novel issues or tackle problems with new approaches or methodologies in mathematics teacher noticing and can make significant contributions to and impact on the mathematics education community. We received submissions from mathematics education researchers working in the relevant fields from around the world. Eventually, seven articles were published after rigorous double-blind peer review. These articles reported research led by authors from Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, and USA.