Capturing teacher priorities: Using real-world eye-tracking to investigate expert teacher priorities across two cultures

Classroom teaching is complex. In the classroom, teachers must readily attend to disruptions and successfully convey new tasks and information. Outside the classroom, teachers must organise their priorities that are important for successful student learning. In fact, differing gaze patterns can reveal the varying priorities that teachers have. Teacher priorities are likely to vary with classroom expertise and can conceivably change with culture too. Therefore, the present study investigated expertise related and cultural teacher priorities by analysing their gaze proportions. To obtain this data, 40 secondary school teachers wore eye-tracking glasses during class time, with 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from the UK and 20 teachers (10 expert; 10 novice) from Hong Kong. We analysed gaze proportions during teachers' attentional (i.e., information-seeking, e.g., teacher questioning students) and communicative (i.e., information-giving, e.g., teacher lecturing students) gaze. Regardless of culture, expert teachers' gaze proportions revealed prioritisation of students, whereas novice teachers gave priority to non-instructional (i.e., not students, teacher materials, or student materials) classroom regions. Hong Kong teachers prioritised teacher materials (e.g., whiteboard) during communicative gaze whereas UK teachers prioritised non-instructional regions. Regarding culture-specific expertise, with Hong Kong experts prioritised teacher materials more than UK experts who, in turn, did so more than UK novices. We thus demonstrate the role of implicit teacher gaze measures as micro-level indicators of macro-level and explicit aspects of instruction, namely teacher priority

To guide or to follow? Teaching visual problem solving at the workplace

Visual problem solving is essential to highly visual and knowledge-intensive professional domains such as clinical pathology, which trainees learn by participating in relevant tasks at the workplace (apprenticeship). Proper guidance of the visual problem solving of apprentices by the master is necessary. Interaction and adaptation to the expertise level of the learner are identified as key ingredients of this guidance. This study focuses on the effect of increased participation of the learner in the task on the interaction and adaptation of the guidance by masters. Thirteen unique dyads consisting of a clinical pathologist (master) and a resident (apprentice) discussed and diagnosed six microscope images. Their dialogues were analysed on their content. The dyads were divided in two groups according to the experience of the apprentice. For each dyad, master and apprentice both operated the microscope for half of the cases. Interaction was operationalised as the equal contribution of both master and apprentice to the dialogue. Adaptation was operationalised as the extent to which the content of the dialogues was adapted to the apprentice’s level. The main hypothesis stated that the interaction and adaptation increase when apprentices operate the microscope. Most results confirmed this hypothesis: apprentices contributed more content when participating more and the content of these dialogues better reflected expertise differences of apprentices. Based on these results, it is argued that, for learning visual problem solving in a visual and knowledge-intensive domain, it is not only important to externalise master performance, but also that of the apprentice

An exploration of secondary students' mental states when learning about acids and bases

This study explored factors of students’ mental states, including emotion, intention, internal mental representation, and external mental representation, which can affect their learning performance. In evaluating students’ mental states during the science learning process and the relationship between mental states and learning achievement, valid, reliable, and scalable measures of students’ mental states and learning achievement are needed. This paper presents the development of the Mental State Conceptual Learning Inventory (MSCLI) to identify students’ mental states before and after learning about acids and bases. This instrument is time efficient and convenient and can be administered to large student samples so that teachers and researchers can gain profound insights into their students’ learning of acids and bases in science class. The results of this study indicate that students’ mental states are highly correlated with their achievement. As a whole, low-achieving students tended to have negative emotions and low intentions, were not good at internal visualization, and were unable to interpret graphics and draw pictures. In contrast, high-achieving students had positive emotions and intentions when learning life-related topics about acids and bases, and were good at internal visualization and drawing and interpreting graphics

A preliminary investigation to explore the cognitive resources of physicians experiencing difficulty in training

Background Treating patients is complex, and research shows that there are differences in cognitive resources between physicians who experience difficulties, and those who do not. It is possible that differences in some cognitive resources could explain the difficulties faced by some physicians. In this study, we explore differences in cognitive resources between different groups of physicians (that is, between native (UK) physicians and International Medical Graduates (IMG); those who continue with training versus those who were subsequently removed from the training programme); and also between physicians experiencing difficulties compared with the general population. Methods A secondary evaluation was conducted on an anonymised dataset provided by the East Midlands Professional Support Unit (PSU). One hundred and twenty one postgraduate trainee physicians took part in an Educational Psychology assessment through PSU. Referrals to the PSU were mainly on the basis of problems with exam progression and difficulties in communication skills, organisation and confidence. Cognitive resources were assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV). Physicians were categorised into three PSU outcomes: ‘Continued in training’, ‘Removed from training’ and ‘Active’ (currently accessing the PSU). Results Using a one-sample Z test, we compared the referred physician sample to a UK general population sample on the WAIS-IV and found the referred sample significantly higher in Verbal Comprehension (VCI; z = 8.78) and significantly lower in Working Memory (WMI; z = −4.59). In addition, the native sample were significantly higher in Verbal Comprehension than the UK general population sample (VCI; native physicians: z = 9.95, p < .001, d = 1.25), whilst there was a lesser effect for the difference between the IMG sample and the UK general population (z = 2.13, p = .03, d = 0.29). Findings also showed a significant difference in VCI scores between those physicians who were ‘Removed from training’ and those who ‘Continued in training’. Conclusions Our results suggest it is important to understand the cognitive resources of physicians to provide a more focussed explanation of those who experience difficulties in training. This will help to implement more targeted interventions to help physicians develop compensatory strategies