Science Teacher Noticing of Reform-Based Instructional Practices
Teacher noticing, what teachers attend to, how they interpret it, and how they respond, is a core dimension of teaching expertise. Yet the noticing of science-specific practices remains underexplored, particularly for teachers working within reform-based curriculum such as the NGSS.
My doctoral and ongoing work investigates:
- What preservice and in-service teachers attend to, and how they interpret events, in science classroom videos
- How teachers’ interpretations of Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) relate to their own classroom enactment
- How emotions influence what teachers notice — and what they overlook
Across this work, I view noticing not only as a cognitive practice but also as a relational one: what teachers attend to shapes whose contributions are taken up as substantive in the classroom.
Representative work:
- Huang, Y., Luft, J. A., Tran, H. H., DeLuca, J. J., Pavez, J., & Whitworth, B. (2025). Exploring the attending and interpretation of three science and engineering practices among secondary science teachers. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-025-10548-9
- Luft, J. A., Huang, Y., Singh, H., Ozen-Tasdemir, H., DeLuca, J., Watson, S., Ayano, E., & Whitworth, B. A. (2024). Exploring the noticing of science teachers: What teachers notice and using video to capture teacher knowledge. School Science and Mathematics, 124(3), 159–170.https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.12623
Authority in Science Learning Environments
I partner with teachers, teacher educators, and community members to co-design science learning experiences rooted in local knowledge and concerns. Drawing on design-based implementation research and community-based participatory research, I study how authority， who is recognized as a knowledge contributor, whose ideas are taken up, whose questions reshape the work， is distributed and renegotiated across co-design partnerships: between researchers and teachers, between adults and youth, and between disciplinary and community knowledge.
As part of an NSF-funded project at UC Irvine, I examine how high school students take up authority during community interviews, and how that authority reshapes the environmental engineering curriculum we build together.
Representative work:
- Huang, Y., Gyles, S., Bisht, A., Santagata, R., Kang, H., Ludovise, S., & Long, J. (accepted). Examining youth authority in community interviews during the co-design of an environmental engineering curriculum. Proceedings of ICLS 2026.
Looking Ahead
Building on both research lines, my next phase of work brings them into direct conversation by seeing teacher noticing as an authority practice — examining how what teachers notice (and don’t notice) distributes epistemic authority, and how emerging technologies, including AI-supported classroom analytics, reshape this distribution in science learning environments.
Prospective Ph.D. Students
I am actively recruiting Ph.D. students for Fall 2027. I look for students who:
- have prior academic training in STEM fields
- are proficient in English
- are curious about science teacher learning
- bring lived or professional experience in K–12 science classrooms or community settings
If your interests resonate, email me a short note about what draws you to this work, along with a CV. Please apply to UH’s Curriculum & Instruction Ph.D. program.