Teacher’s Sensitivity towards pupils: a Mobile Eye Tracking Study

Just presented, yesterday the 14th of September, at EC-TEL conf. (in Lyon), a study aiming at investigating which cues teachers detect and process from their students during instruction. This information capturing process depends on teachers’ sensitivity, or awareness, to students’ needs, which has been recognized as crucial for classroom management.

We recorded the gaze behaviors of two pre-service teachers and two experienced teachers during a whole math lesson in primary classrooms. Thanks to a simple Learning Analytics interface, the data analysis reports, firstly, which were the most often tracked students, in relation with their classroom behavior and performance; secondly, which relationships exist between teachers’ attentional frequency distribution and lability, and the overall classroom climate they promote, measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. Results show that participants’ gaze patterns are mainly related to their experience. Learning Analytics use cases are eventually presented, enabling researchers or teacher trainers to further explore the eye-tracking data.
The co-authors of this study are: Olivier Cosnefroy, LSE, Univ. Grenoble Alpes & Vanda Luengo, LIP6, UPMC, Paris.
The full paper is available here.