What Can Eye Movements Tell us about Visual Perception Processes in Classroom Contexts? Commentary on a Special Issue
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What Can Eye Movements Tell us about Visual Perception Processes in Classroom Contexts? Commentary on a Special Issue Johanna K. Kaakinen 1 Accepted: 6 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
In this commentary to the Special Issue of Educational Psychology Review on visual perceptual processes, I tie the empirical studies reported in the issue with previous research in other domains to offer some points to be considered in future studies. First, I will point out to issues related to the operationalization of the theoretical constructs. The empirical papers in this Special Issue use eye tracking to study students’ engagement, teachers’ expertise, and student-teacher interaction. However, it is not always clear how the observed eye movement patterns reflect these theoretical concepts and the underlying psychological processes. Second, I will reflect on the analyses of the eye movement data presented in the papers. The main advantage of the methodology is that it can provide detailed information about the time-course of processing, and to fully engage its potential, it should be complemented with adequate statistical methods. In my view, the papers in this Special Issue provide valuable novel information about the complex processes underlying learning in variable contexts, and offer an excellent starting point for future research. Keywords Eye movements . Statistical analysis . Education . Interaction . Engagement
Introduction The papers included in this Special Issue present a collection of research aiming to untangle the visual perception processes that occur in educational context, and specifically, in naturalistic learning and teaching contexts. The studies combine various research methods in innovative ways to study student engagement in a classroom setting during instruction (Goldberg et al., this issue; Rosengrant et al., this issue), teacher expertise and “professional vision” in instructional context (Seidel et al., this issue; Wyss et al., this issue), and the characteristics of
* Johanna K. Kaakinen [email protected]
1
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland
Educational Psychology Review
student-teacher interaction (Haataja et al., this issue; Pouta et al., this issue). A common denominator of the studies is that they utilize eye tracking, which offers very time-sensitive information about visual perception and attention. Some studies have used a specialized equipment to track the precise eye movements (i.e., fixations and saccades) of a participant, whereas others have relied on sophisticated automated image processing to extract the general direction of eye gaze of individual students from a video recording of a whole classroom. The basic idea behind eye tracking is that eye gaze is assumed to reflect the contents of thought; for example, during reading, it is typically assumed that the reader is actively processing the piece of text their eyes are fixated on and that longer and more frequent gazes are taken as indicators of either more complex or diff
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