Scanpath analysis of expertise and culture in teacher gaze in real-world classrooms

Humans are born to learn by understanding where adults look. This is likely to extend into the classroom, making teacher gaze an important topic for study. Expert teacher gaze has mainly been investigated in the laboratory, and has focused mostly on one cognitive process: teacher attentional (i.e., information-seeking) gaze. No known research has made direct cultural comparisons of teacher gaze or successfully found expert–novice differences outside Western settings. Accordingly, we conducted a real-world study of expert teacher gaze across two cultural settings, exploring communicative (i.e., information-giving) as well as attentional gaze. Forty secondary school teachers wore eye-tracking glasses, with 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from the UK and 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from Hong Kong. We used a novel eye-tracking scanpath analysis to ascertain the importance of expertise and culture, individually and as a combination. Attentional teacher scanpaths were significantly more similar within than across expertise and expertise + culture sub-groups; communicative scanpaths were significantly more similar within than across expertise and culture. Detailed analysis suggests that (1) expert teachers refer back to students constantly through focused gaze during both attentional and communicative gaze and that (2) expert teachers in Hong Kong scan students more than experts do in the UK

Participatory instructional redesign by students and teachers in secondary education: effects on perceptions of instruction

Könings, K. D., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2011). Participatory instructional redesign by students and teachers in secondary education: effects on perceptions of instruction. Instructional Science, 39(5), 737–762.Students’ perceptions of instruction are important because they direct the learning of students. The fact that teachers have only limited knowledge of these perceptions is likely to threaten the effectiveness of learning, because congruence between interpretations of an instructional intervention is necesarry for its optimal use. This study examines participatory design as a strategy for taking student perceptions into account in instructional re/design. Participatory design meetings of groups of teachers and seven co-designing students in a secondary education setting identified changes to improve the regular education process. The results on changes in student perceptions, perceived-desired discrepancy, and teacher-student disagreement showed some improvement for the co-designers but, unexpectedly, limited or even negative effects for the non-co-designing students. Possible causes are discussed. Participatory design seems to have potential for improving education, but further research is needed