Teacher's Perception in the Classroom

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method combining mobile eye tracking and computer vision to analyze teachers' attentional focus on students during classroom instruction, providing new insights into teaching effectiveness.

Contribution

It presents the first integration of computer vision with mobile eye tracking to model teachers' attention in educational settings, improving analysis efficiency.

Findings

Successfully applied face detection and clustering to identify students in eye-tracking videos.

Calculated teachers' attention distribution across students during teaching sessions.

First to connect computer vision with eye tracking for educational research.

Abstract

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.