Advancing Research on Teachers' Professional Vision: Implementing novel Technologies, Methods and Theories

Book excerpt: A classroom full of students can be overwhelming for teachers. It is critical that teachers are able to filter and meaningfully interpret the relevant information in this complex scenario. Much of this filtering and interpretation occurs through selective visual perception. Over the last decade, a rapidly growing number of studies in empirical educational research used eye tracking to investigate teachers' selective visual perceptual processes in the classroom. Theoretically, visual attention and perception are often conceptualized as knowledge-based noticing coupled with knowledge-based reasoning about what is visually perceived. Recent eye-tracking studies have shown that experienced teachers, in particular, show improved selective attention of classroom events through faster detection of relevant information and improved monitoring of learning-relevant situations. Researchers agree that a critical driver of selective attention processes is the professional knowledge (declarative, procedural, and metacognitive) of (experienced) teachers, which controls selective perceptual processes in a top-down process. The findings are significant and provide important insights for research on teacher professionalization.