Designing a video-stimulated questionnaire about teachers’ adaptive expertise in interdisciplinary mathematics and science teaching

Research investigating teachers’ knowledge and practices aimed to improve student participation, engagement and achievement in mathematics and science has often used qualitative methods involving observation and analysis of lesson videos. Some researchers have used excerpts of videos in various ways to gather data about their participants’ anticipated actions in the moment. In the current study, we aimed to track primary teachers’ developing adaptive expertise when teaching interdisciplinary mathematics and science lessons over a two-year period. In this paper, we describe the processes followed to design a questionnaire that used episodes from videos of interdisciplinary mathematics and science lessons to construct multiple choice items. The adaptive expertise scoring for the items was reliable but this improved when including an open-ended question for participants to explain their selection of an action for the classroom moment captured in the video episode.