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Investigating Visual Perception in Teaching and Learning with Advanced Eye-Tracking Methodologies: Rewards and Challenges of an Innovative Research Paradigm Matthias Nückles 1 # The Author(s) 2020

Abstract

In this discussion paper, teaching and learning are characterized as being situated, complex, and reciprocally interactive activities. Accordingly, a teacher’s pedagogical actions are always action and reaction at the same time. Irrespective of the reciprocally interactive nature of teaching and learning, educational research has sought to identify characteristics of teacher expertise that enable teachers to influence students’ learning in a systematic and positive way. In this respect, the contributions to this special issue offer an innovative research paradigm, because they bring together different and originally separated strands of research: (1) research on professional vision in teacher education, (2) research on the structure and development of expertise in cognitive science, (3) research on cognitive processes by means of eye-tracking technologies in psychology, and (4) research on educational effectiveness and instructional quality in educational science. Following this introduction, a detailed discussion of the rewards and challenges of each of the seven contributions is provided. This discussion leads to the following conclusions: (a) The emphasis on the “reacting teacher” in professional vision research undervalues the role of lesson planning for the flexible handling of sudden events during class instruction. (b) The assumption of professional vision as mediator between a teacher’s knowledge and pedagogical actions overlooks that teachers can sometimes do more than they can tell. (c) Not all of the gaze behavior that is currently studied needs to be instructed. (d) Research should move beyond explorative expert-novice comparisons to hypotheses-driven designs that investigate how teachers can learn to successfully apply evidence-based pedagogical principles. Keywords Professional vision . Eye-tracking . Teacher expertise . Cognitive processes . Instructional quality

* Matthias Nückles [email protected]–freiburg.de

1

Department of Educational Science, University of Freiburg, Rempartstr. 11, 79098 Freiburg, Germany

Educational Psychology Review

Today, we have reached a scholarly understanding of teaching and learning as being situated, complex, and reciprocally interactive activities. Teaching can be considered as situated because each pedagogical action is embedded in a concrete communicational context, and therefore, its meaning and function can only be reconstructed in relation to this context. For example, whether a teacher’s praise for a student’s performance on a task can be regarded as autonomy promoting or rather autonomy constraining (see Ryan and Deci 2000) depends on the concrete learning situation (e.g., receiving explicit praise for the mastery of a very simple task might lead the student to believe that s/he has a rather low ability level compared with the peer students). C