Differences in Student Teachers' and Experienced Teachers' Visual Attention Processing, Judgments, and Instructions of Fractions

• In Event: Eye-Tracking Research on Teacher Noticing: Theoretical and Empirical Advances

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore differences in student teachers’ (n=4) and experienced
teachers’ (n=4) professional vision in natural settings and to elicit clues of the relation of in-the-moment noticing, visual processing and instruction quality.

To guide pupils optimally, a teacher needs professional vision skills; selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning (Seidel & Stürmer, 2014). These skills are known to be subject-specific (Blomberg et al., 2011a) and situated (Nückles, 2020), but also strongly guided by teachers’ more established knowledge structures (Meschede, 2017). Identifying pupils’ individual needs demands accurate judgements skills, which relation to professional vision has only recently been investigated (Seidel et al., 2020). Teachers’ professional vision skills are especially essential when teaching demanding and complex content knowledge, such as rational number concept.

Mobile eye-tracking technique enables video recording of natural teaching situations from a teacher’s perspective with teacher’s eye-movements that indicate teacher’s attention to features in the teaching situation. Hence, mobile eye tracking gathers more explicit evidence of teachers’ professional vision and visual attention processes than video-recorded lessons.
Combined with cued retrospective reporting and judgment survey data, more in-depth analysis of teacher’s attention, interpretations and instruction quality are possible to investigate. The video and eye- movement data was gathered during one mathematics lesson about fractions of each student teacher and experienced teacher with Tobii Pro Glasses 2 mobile eye-tracking device. Only episodes where teachers were guiding individual students or student pairs were used in the study. In addition, teacher students and experienced teachers guiding their practice evaluated their students’ mathematical competencies before the lessons.


The correlations of student teachers’ and experienced teachers’ judgements in different areas of mathematics varied between particular student teacher – experienced teacher pairs.

Results indicated that both student teachers and experienced teachers attended to mathematical and fraction-related aspects similarly but differed in interpreting and instructing students’ fraction understanding. Student teachers made more advanced interpretations but their instructions were less adequate, whereas among experienced teachers, it was just the opposite. Furthermore, student teachers made more attempts to strengthen shared attention during interaction, which was not focused on supporting fraction understanding, whereas experienced teachers’ attempts to shared attention were related to fraction understanding supporting instructions. Furthermore, student teachers and experienced teachers were similar in their visual attention processes, despite more individual differences among student teachers in the proportions of visual attention. Both experienced teachers and student teachers were mostly attending to the pupils they were guiding. They attended to other aspects of the learning situation as much as they attended to pupils who they were not guiding at the moment.

Results indicate that both student teachers’ and experienced teachers’ targeting of support and visual attention is situation-specific rather than fixed by their knowledge of a pupil’s need for support in mathematics. Results show student teachers’ difficulty to transfer pedagogical content knowledge from noticing to actions and experienced teachers to have more enhanced in- the-moment professional vision and its application to teaching.

Authors

• Maikki Pouta, University of Turku

• Erno A. Lehtinen, University of Turku

• Tuire Palonen, University of Turku