Guiding pre-service teachers’ visual attention through instructional settings: an eye-tracking study

In complex classroom situations, pre-service teachers often struggle to identify relevant information. Consequently, classroom videos are widely used to support pre-service teachers’ professional vision. However, pre-service teachers need instructional guidance to attend to relevant information in classroom videos. Previous studies identified a specific task instruction and prompts as promising instructions to enhance pre-service teachers’ professional vision. This mixed-methods eye-tracking study aimed to compare pre-service teachers’ visual attention to information relevant for classroom management in one of three instructional conditions. Participants viewed two classroom videos and clicked a button whenever they identified situations relevant to classroom management in the videos. They got either (1) a specific task instruction before video viewing (n = 45), (2) attention-guiding prompts during video viewing (n = 45), or (3) a general task instruction (n = 45) before video viewing as a control group. We expected a specific task instruction and prompts to better guide participants’ visual attention compared to a general task instruction before video viewing because both experimental conditions contained informational cues to focus on specific dimensions of classroom management. As both a specific task and prompts were assumed to activate cognitive schemata, resulting in knowledge-based processing of visual information, we expected the specific task instruction to have a similar attention-guiding effect as prompts during video viewing. Measurements were conducted on an outcome level (mouse clicks) and on a process level (eye tracking). Findings confirmed our hypotheses on an outcome level and in part on a process level regarding participants’ gaze relational index. Nevertheless, in a disruptive classroom situation, participants of the prompting condition showed better attentional performance than participants of the other conditions regarding a higher number of fixation and a shorter time to first fixation on disruptive students. Further qualitative analyses revealed that, when observing classroom videos without instructional guidance, pre-service teachers were less likely to identify disruptive situations in the video and more likely to attend to other situations of classroom management concerning the teachers’ action. We discuss advantages of both attention-guiding instructions for pre-service teacher education in terms of the economy of implementation and the salience of situations.