The ability for a teacher to engage all students in active learning processes in classroom constitutes a crucial prerequisite for enhancing students achievement. Teachers' attentional processes provide important insights into teachers' ability to focus their attention on relevant information in the complexity of classroom interaction and distribute their attention across students in order to recognize the relevant needs for learning. In this context, mobile eye tracking is an innovative approach within teaching effectiveness research to capture teachers' attentional processes while teaching. However, analyzing mobile eye-tracking data by hand is time consuming and still limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to enhance the impact of mobile eye tracking by connecting it with computer vision. In mobile eye tracking videos from an educational study using a standardized small group situation, we apply a state-ofthe-art face detector, create face tracklets, and introduce a novel method to cluster faces into the number of identity. Subsequently, teachers' attentional focus is calculated per student during a teaching unit by associating eye tracking fixations and face tracklets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine computer vision and mobile eye tracking to model teachers' attention while instructing.
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. Experience in the classroom influences how teachers interpret classroom events. This article investigated differences between expert and novice teachers' interpretations of authentic, problematic classroom events. Two types of videos presented problematic events, displaying either unrelated problems, such as disengaged, off-task students, or interrelated problems leading to a flagrant disruption. Predicted differences in teachers’ verbalized interpretations were analyzed through a multi-category coding scheme. All coding categories showed significant main effects for expertise. Novices interpretations focused on issues of behavior and discipline. Experts were markedly focused on student learning, stressing the influential role of the teacher on events arising in the classroom.