Teacher noticing in K–12 science education: a literature review of its role in students’ scientific thinking

Teacher noticing refers to how educators attend to, interpret, and respond to evidence of students’ thinking during classroom interactions. This integrative narrative review examined how teacher noticing may shape opportunities for scientific thinking in K–12 science education. Scientific thinking was conceptualized as inquiry, systematic observation, evidence evaluation, explanation construction, conceptual revision, and collaborative knowledge building. This review searched Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and relevant reference lists, and documented the study identification and selection process using a flow diagram adapted from PRISMA 2020. These procedures identified 17 empirical studies for integrative thematic synthesis. The synthesis suggests that teacher noticing involves selective attention, interpretation of students’ scientific ideas, and instructional response. Across the reviewed studies, teachers attended to students’ everyday language, tentative explanations, questions, drawings, classroom artifacts, inquiry practices, and participation. They interpreted the disciplinary and epistemic significance of these expressions and, in some cases, formulated or enacted responsive instructional moves. However, the evidence was strongest for teachers’ attention to and interpretation of student thinking. Enacted instructional responses were examined less frequently, and direct evidence linking teacher noticing to sustained student-level development remains limited. The findings therefore support a recursive account of noticing rather than a fixed sequence. Instructional responses may generate new student expressions that become available for further attention and interpretation. Overall, teacher noticing is best understood as a knowledge-guided, discipline-specific, and developable professional practice. It may shape the instructional and epistemic conditions for scientific reasoning, sensemaking, and knowledge construction. Future research should connect classroom-embedded measures of teacher noticing with longitudinal evidence of students’ reasoning, evidence use, explanation, and conceptual development.