Teaching through their eyes: effects on optometry teachers ’ adaptivity and students’ learning when teachers see students’ gaze

AbstractAdaptive teacher support fosters effective learning in one-to-one teaching sessions, which are a common way of learning complex visual tasks in the health sciences. Adaptive support is tailored to student needs, and this is difficult in complex visual tasks as visual problem-solving processes are covert and thus cannot be directly observed by the teacher. Eye-tracking apparatus can measure covert processes and make them visible in gaze displays: visualizations of where a student looks while executing a task. We investigate whether live dynamic gaze displays help teachers in being more adaptive to students ’ needs when teaching optical coherence tomography interpretation in one-to-one teaching sessions and whether this fosters learning. Forty-nine students and 10 teachers participated in a one-to-one teaching session in clinical optometry. In the control condition, teachers saw the learning task of the student and could discuss it with them, whereas in the gaze-display condition, teachers could additionally see where the student looked. After the 15-minute teaching session, a test was administered to examine achievement. Furthermore, students filled in the ‘questionnaire on teacher support a daptivity’, and teachers rated how adaptive their support was. Bayesian analyses provide some initial evidence that students did not experience support to be more adaptive in the gaze-display condition versus the control condition, nor were their post-test scores higher. Teac...
Source: Advances in Health Sciences Education - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: research