Teacher attention distribution between students in relation to teacher knowledge about student learning behaviours

Abstract

Teaching adaptively is a key to address different learning needs of students in the classroom. Students vary not only in their levels of subject knowledge, but also in learning approaches and motivational predispositions, known as the capacity to regulate own learning. In the classroom, teachers observe students and diagnose student learning continuously to provide support when necessary. Teacher attention in the classroom is not arbitrary but interrelated with their professional and contextual knowledge, thus is part of teacher professional vision (Sherin and van Es, 2002). Teachers can proactively guide their attention to students depending on the current instructional intentions (i.e., to explain new material comprehensively or to provide feedback) and what they know about students as learners, in a top down manner. At the same time, teachers respond to behaviours, reactions, and interactions in the classroom, thus distribute their attention to stimuli in the environment in a rather bottom-up way (Wolff et al., 2016). This study investigates how teachers distribute visual attention between students in one lesson in relation to teacher’s knowledge about their students as self-regulated learners. Ten secondary school teachers and their respective students (N=158) took part in the study. The teachers taught one full lesson wearing a mobile eye tracker and provided a rating of each student’s learning behaviours. The number and duration of teacher gaze visits to each student in the classroom were coded in the eye tracker recordings and analysed in relation to the teacher ratings. Analyses with Mann-Whitney U tests showed that teachers allocated significantly more attention to higher-regulated students when presenting lesson content, while there were no significant differences in attention between higher regulated and lower-regulated students when teachers monitored student work and gave feedback. Further cluster analyses showed that a sub-group of the higher regulated students received more teacher attention than others in the whole lesson. The findings suggest that teachers distribute attention between students in a rather balanced way with a tendency to look more at higher-regulated students. These results from the natural classroom settings challenge the theoretical assumption that teachers would proactively monitor lower-regulated students who potentially require more support from the teacher in the lesson. Besides, the results suggest a need for investigation of the bottom-up process such as amount of interaction from the students linked to student characteristics that influence teacher attention distribution to students. Finally, considerations regarding variability in the authentic data from different classrooms, as well as teacher and student characteristics in the present sample will be discussed in connection with previous mobile eye tracking studies.