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Comparing competency-oriented student activities between expert and novice teachers in China: Insights from an epistemic network analysis (ENA)

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Abstract

Competency-oriented student activities are an important means of enabling teachers to move from teaching fundamental knowledge to developing students' subject competencies. To examine mathematics teacher novice–expert differences in organizing competency-oriented activities, this study collected data from three consecutive lessons taught by an expert and a novice teacher respectively. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) was used to identify the co-occurrence and structure of students' activities in each lesson. Results of the coding-and-counting method show statistically significant differences in the types of students’ activities related to mathematics competency across the lessons taught by the expert teacher, but not in those taught by the novice teacher. By recognizing the temporal relationships between different activities, the ENA of the consecutive lessons reveals that the expert teacher facilitated better mathematical content and lesson connectedness by establishing connections between competency-oriented activities following the sequence of understanding-applying-transferring and innovating (Wang et al., 2022). In contrast, the novice teacher organized more mathematics activities on understanding and applying, without building connections via transferring and innovating across three lessons. The results of the ENA are also supported by qualitative analysis. Finally, the implications, limitations, and possibilities for future research are discussed.

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Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this Manuscript and are available from the corresponding author Chunxia Qi on reasonable request.

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Qi, C., Liang, H., Zuo, S. et al. Comparing competency-oriented student activities between expert and novice teachers in China: Insights from an epistemic network analysis (ENA). Educ Inf Technol 29, 15375–15402 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12467-8

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