Abstract
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.
Highlights
Expertise can be seen at every level of teaching
While there are very few datasets regarding gaze in real-world teaching, we recently reported a study in which teachers from the UK and Hong Kong were eye-tracked in secondary school classrooms
The present analysis extends our previous work on the same dataset (e.g., McIntyre et al 2017) in which we reported that expert teachers give greater importance to students and use their classroom gaze more efficiently than novices
Summary
Expertise can be seen at every level of teaching. At the micro-level, teachers reveal exceptional and unique internal processes that have been developed and refined over time, including their memory (Ericsson and Kintsch 1995), strategy (Chassy and Gobet 2011), efficiency (Haider et al 2005) and intuition (Sherin 2006). Expertise in teaching predicts what teachers look at and suggests how teachers look around the classroom (e.g., Cortina et al 2015). We can expect expertise to differentiate teachers’ scanpaths as it does in other domains (e.g., Foerster et al 2011). Since culture entails different experiences, culture might differentiate teachers’ scanpaths, which would support broader theories of expertise (Sternberg 2014). We investigated the role of expertise and culture in distinguishing teachers’ scanpaths
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