Teacher Adaptive Cognition: A Critical Review of Teacher Adaptability Research from 1975 to 2023

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 10:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Learning and Learning to Teach (Table 9)

Abstract

Educators’ capacity to adjust their thoughts and behaviors to meet students’ diverse needs and characteristics in an unfolding teaching situation is a cornerstone of effective teaching. While teachers’ instructional adaptations have been studied from various angles, a robust theoretical framework that precisely distinguishes yet cohesively integrates teachers’ cognitive processes and capabilities of adaptive teaching is lacking. To address this, I engage in a critical review of literature on adaptive teaching from 1975 to 2023, which gives rise to the Teacher Adaptive-Cognition Theory (TACT). The TACT model differentiates between behavioral performance, cognitive performance, and cognitive readiness for adaptation, positing that analyses of cognitive processes and capabilities of adaptive teaching should be systematically contextualized within each other.

Author

• Ying Hu, University of Vermont