Resumen de Accounting for the variability of lecturing practices in situations of concept introduction

Renaud Chorlay

• This paper aims to contribute to the growing field of research on teaching practices in higher education, with a focus on the prevalent yet unresearched practice of concept introduction in lectures.

  This small-scale case-study provides data which lend themselves to a comparative analysis, with a view to describing and accounting for the dispersion of practices which can be observed in spite of the similarity of teaching conditions: three teachers lecturing on the same formal definition of limits of sequences, in similar institutional conditions. A combination of an a priori mapped out space of possible actions, and concepts from the theory of teaching as decision-making allows for a fine-grained analysis of the data, consisting of video-recordings of the sessions, supplemented by preand post-interviews with the teachers. We identified two key factors – knowledge of action-plans and ‘subjective expected utility’ (Schoenfeld, A. H. (2013). Classroom observation in theory and practice.

  ZDM (Mathematics Education), 45, 607–621) – on the basis of which the instructors’ engagement in teaching can be accounted for in a non-evaluative research perspective.