Teacher noticing is widely recognized as central to responsive teaching (Sherin & van Es, 2009; Jacobs et al., 2010), yet science education research has often described what teachers attend to more than how they interpret student thinking in discipline-specific ways (Chan et al., 2021; Amador & Weston, 2024). This gap is especially consequential in conceptually dense topics such as heat and temperature, where students’ ideas are frequently shaped by everyday language and experience and where partially correct explanations can coexist with persistent conceptual confusions. Teachers’ interpretive stances therefore matter because they shape whether students’ utterances are treated as resources for scientific sense-making or positioned mainly as errors to be corrected (Coffey et al., 2011).

Building on conceptualizations that distinguish attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond (Jacobs et al., 2010; Barnhart & van Es, 2015), this study focuses on the interpreting facet and examines qualitative variation in physics teachers’ meaning-making about student conceptual knowledge and reasoning. Rather than classifying teacher noticing with broad evaluative labels, the study aims to make interpretive pathways visible and describable by identifying patterns in what teachers treat as salient, what they take as evidence, and how they warrant claims about students’ thinking. The study is grounded in a view of noticing as professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) and knowledge-based reasoning. Accordingly, even when teachers respond to the same student knowledge or reasoning in a shared stimulus, they can differ in what they treat as evidence and in how they justify their interpretations.

Empirically, the study uses a shared instructional stimulus in which all participants respond to the same hypothetical classroom dialogue on heat and temperature. This design enables systematic comparison of interpretive stances under a common condition while still approximating classroom discourse and the kinds of student ideas teachers regularly encounter. The focal content domain includes heat, temperature, and internal energy, along with internationally documented conceptual difficulties and reasoning patterns. Although the data are situated in one national context, the domain and its learning challenges have been widely reported across countries, supporting the broader relevance of the interpretive patterns identified.

Research question: What are the qualitative variations in physics teachers’ interpretations of students’ conceptual knowledge and reasoning when prompted by a hypothetical classroom dialogue on heat and temperature?

The intended contribution is a transferable analytic lens that maps variation in teachers’ interpretive orientations and clarifies how different interpretations are constructed. By rendering interpretive work more explicit, the study provides a basis for teacher education discussions about analyzing student thinking in science and for future work examining how interpretive orientations relate to subsequent instructional moves and to students’ opportunities for scientific sense-making. 

Participants and context: Data were collected from 68 in-service high school physics teachers in Ankara, Turkey, spanning a wide range of experience from novice to over 20 years. Basic demographics (gender, graduated department, and years of teaching) were recorded. Participation was voluntary, and teachers completed the written task in a single session. Instrument: The stimulus was an 80-line classroom-like dialogue between a teacher and five students. Students were not assigned fixed identities; a student could express multiple difficulties or partially correct ideas across the dialogue. The dialogue targeted internationally documented conceptual challenges in heat, temperature, internal energy, and related reasoning patterns. It was developed with the advisor, revised through expert feedback, and refined after a pilot. Teachers then answered three open-ended prompts aligned with noticing facets (Jacobs et al., 2010; van Es & Sherin, 2002): (1) statements noticed as important, (2) what those statements reveal about students’ conceptual knowledge and/or reasoning and what it means for the teacher, and (3) instructional decisions in response. This paper analyzes Prompt 2. Analytic approach: Analysis followed a qualitative, variation-oriented logic consistent with phenomenography (Marton, 1986) and adopted a second-order perspective, examining how teachers experience and describe student thinking rather than judging correctness. Responses were read repeatedly and segmented into meaning units, defined as interpretive segments where a teacher makes a claim about student thinking and provides an explanation or warrant. Through iterative, inductive coding and constant comparison, categories of description were developed to capture qualitatively different interpretive orientations. An outcome space (category map) was then constructed to represent structural relations among categories in terms of what is treated as salient, what counts as evidence, and how claims are warranted. MAXQDA supported anonymization (P1–P68), coding, memos, and traceability. Trustworthiness: Trustworthiness was supported through an iterative consensus approach. A second coder (physics education expert) independently coded about 20% of the dataset, followed by consensus meetings to refine decision rules and resolve ambiguities. The refined codebook was applied in a second coding pass, yielding high agreement for the coded subset. An audit trail was maintained via analytic memos and ongoing refinements of code definitions in MAXQDA to document category development and support transparency (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

An analysis of 970 coded units shows qualitative variation in teachers’ interpretations of student conceptual knowledge and reasoning. A coded unit was defined as a coherent interpretive segment in which a teacher makes a claim about student thinking and provides an explanation or warrant. The analysis develops an outcome space (category map) of four interpretive orientations, positioned relationally by systematic differences in what teachers treat as evidence and how they warrant claims about the same student utterances. The most frequent orientation is epistemically oriented interpretation, which foregrounds the coherence and justification of students’ reasoning. Teachers attend to conceptual linkages or mental models, possible sources of ideas, the adequacy of warrants (evidence or logic), and the perceived stability or changeability of students’ thinking. A second orientation is assessment-oriented interpretation, where teachers judge statements against scientific norms. Here assessment-oriented refers to normative evaluation. This includes correctness evaluations (approve, partially approve, or disapprove), brief diagnostic labels (for example, lack of knowledge or misconception), and holistic judgments about overall understanding. Affective-oriented interpretation foregrounds students’ emotions, motivation, and participation, with inferences about engagement, curiosity, hesitation, or reluctance. Metacognitively oriented interpretation captures inferences about students’ awareness and management of their thinking, including noticing confusion, monitoring through self-checking or self-correction, and regulation through strategy adjustment. Overall, the dominance of epistemic interpretations challenges the assumption that teachers primarily interpret student ideas through correctness alone. The resulting map can support teacher education by making interpretive stances visible and discussable, informing professional learning tasks that broaden interpretation beyond correctness checking and laying groundwork for subsequent studies linking interpretive orientations to instructional responses.

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