Teacher vision: expert and novice teachers’ perception of problematic classroom management scenes

By Charlotte E. Wolff, Halszka Jarodzka, Niek den Bogert, Henny P. A. Boshuizen. 2016

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Visual expertise has been explored in numerous professions, but research on teachers’ vision remains limited. Teachers’ visual expertise is an important professional skill, particularly the ability to simultaneously perceive and interpret classroom situations for effective classroom management. This skill is complex and relies on an awareness of classroom events. Using eye tracking measurements and verbal think aloud, we investigated differences in how expert and novice teachers perceive problematic classroom scenes. Sixty-seven teachers participated, 35 experienced secondary school teachers (experts) and 32 teachers-in-training (novices). Participants viewed videos of authentic lessons and their eye movements were recorded as they verbalized thoughts about what they had seen in the lesson and how it was relevant to classroom management. Two different types of videos were viewed: lesson fragments showing (1) multiple events depicting disengaged students with no overt disruptions and (2) multiple events that included a prominent disruptive event affecting the class. Analysis of eye movements showed that novices’ viewing was more dispersed whereas experts’ was more focused. Irrespective of the video type, expert teachers focused their attention on areas where relevant information was available, while novice teachers’ attention was more scattered across the classroom. Experts’ perception appears to be more knowledge-driven whereas novices’ appears more image-driven. Experts monitored more areas than novices, while novices skipped more areas than experts. Word usage also differed, showing that expertise was associated with a higher frequency of words referencing cognition, perception, and events than novices.

Subfields: Education, Speech and Hearing, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2637ead7c3c51bf5b80c3c5e22056c4c6a8560d0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Classroom Management Scripts: a Theoretical Model Contrasting Expert and Novice Teachers’ Knowledge and Awareness of Classroom Events (2020, background): “Their episodic knowledge of events helps them maintain a general perceptual awareness focused on student engagement and learning and whether or not pedagogical goals are being attained (Wolff et al. 2016).”
Student Characteristics in the Eyes of Teachers: Differences Between Novice and Expert Teachers in Judgment Accuracy, Observed Behavioral Cues, and Gaze (2020, methodology): “So far, teacher eye movement studies have been mainly concerned with issues of classroom management (van den Bogert et al. 2014; Wolff et al. 2016), without considering the observation and diagnosis of individual students characteristics.”
Student Teachers’ and Experienced Teachers’ Professional Vision of Students’ Understanding of the Rational Number Concept (2020, unknown): “…perceptions, while expert teachers have more focused and knowledge-based perceptions (Wolff et al. 2016), can monitor more areas than novices (Wolff et al. 2016), focus on students (McIntyre et al. 2019; McIntyre et al. 2017; Stürmer et al. 2017; Van den Bogert et al. 2014), are more…”
Eye-Tracking in Educational Practice: Investigating Visual Perception Underlying Teaching and Learning in the Classroom (2020, background): “…Goodwin 1994) shows that with increasing experience, teachers are capable of picking up visual cues from video recordings of authentic classroom lessons (Van den Bogert et al. 2014; Wolff et al. 2016; Yamamoto and Imai-Matsumura 2013) and interpret them appropriately (Wolff et al. 2015, 2017).”