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1. Identifying Students' Attentive Fidelity for Calculus Instructional Videos

   Weinberg, A.; Tornai, J.; Thomas, M.; Martin, J.; Tallman, M.; Newman, K. (January 2019, Proceedings of the forty-first annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.)

   Growing interest in “flipped” classrooms has made video lessons an increasingly prominent component of post-secondary mathematics curricula. However, relatively little is known about how students watch and learn from instructional videos. We describe and use an eye-tracking methodology to investigate attentive fidelity—the degree to which students attend to the visual imagery that is the subject of the video narration at each moment in time. Our preliminary study suggests that students’ attentive fidelity varies widely, but there was no evidence that this fidelity is connected to students’ ability to solve calculus problems. 

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2. Identifying students’ attentive fidelity for calculus instructional videos.

   Weinberg, A.; Tornai, J.; Thomas, M.; Martin, J; Tallman, M.; Newman, K. (October 2019, Proceedings of the 41st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Growing interest in “flipped” classrooms has made video lessons an increasingly prominent component of post-secondary mathematics curricula. However, relatively little is known about how students watch and learn from instructional videos. We describe and use an eye-tracking methodology to investigate attentive fidelity—the degree to which students attend to the visual imagery that is the subject of the video narration at each moment in time. Our preliminary study suggests that students’ attentive fidelity varies widely, but there was no evidence that this fidelity is connected to students’ ability to solve calculus problems. 

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3. Synchronized eye movements predict test scores in online video education

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016980118  

   Madsen, Jens; Júlio, Sara U.; Gucik, Pawel J.; Steinberg, Richard; Parra, Lucas C. (January 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   Experienced teachers pay close attention to their students, adjusting their teaching when students seem lost. This dynamic interaction is missing in online education. We hypothesized that attentive students follow videos similarly with their eyes. Thus, attention to instructional videos could be assessed remotely by tracking eye movements. Here we show that intersubject correlation of eye movements during video presentation is substantially higher for attentive students and that synchronized eye movements are predictive of individual test scores on the material presented in the video. These findings replicate for videos in a variety of production styles, for incidental and intentional learning and for recall and comprehension questions alike. We reproduce the result using standard web cameras to capture eye movements in a classroom setting and with over 1,000 participants at home without the need to transmit user data. Our results suggest that online education could be made adaptive to a student’s level of attention in real time. 

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4. Comorbid learning difficulties in reading and mathematics: The role of intelligence and in-class attentive behavior

   https://doi.org/doi/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.572099  

   Geary, D. C. (October 2020, Frontiers in psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   The goal was to identify the domain-general cognitive abilities and academic attitudes that are common and unique to reading and mathematics learning difficulties that in turn will have implications for intervention development. Across seventh and eighth grade, 315 (155 boys) adolescents (M age = 12.75 years) were administered intelligence, verbal short-term and working memory, and visuospatial memory, attention, and ability measures, along with measures of English and mathematics attitudes and mathematics anxiety. Teachers reported on students’ in-class attentive behavior. A combination of Bayesian and multi-level models revealed that intelligence and in-class attentive behavior were common predictors of reading accuracy, reading fluency, and mathematics achievement. Verbal short-term memory was more critical for reading accuracy and fluency, whereas spatial ability and mathematics self-efficacy were more critical for mathematics achievement. The combination of intelligence and in-class attentive behavior discriminated typically-achieving students from students with comorbid (D = 2.44) or mathematics (D = 1.59) learning difficulties, whereas intelligence, visuospatial attention, and verbal short-term memory discriminated typically-achieving students from students with reading disability (D = 1.08). The combination of in-class attentive behavior, verbal short-term memory, and mathematics self-efficacy discriminated students with mathematics difficulties from their peers with reading difficulties (D = 1.16). Given the consistent importance of in-class attentive behavior, we conducted post hoc follow-up analyses. The results suggested that students with poor in-class attentive behavior were disengaging from academic learning which in turn contributed to their risk of learning difficulties. 

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5. Leveraging the expertise of the urban STEM student in developing an effective LA Program: LA and Instructor Partnerships

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2016.pr.067  

   Sabella, Mel S.; Van Duzor, Andrea G.; Davenport, Felicia (December 2016, 2016 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings)

   A key component to the success of the Learning Assistant (LA) Model is the relationship that forms between LAs and faculty members. These relationships can enhance the effectiveness of the model by leveraging the expertise of the LAs and placing LAs in leadership roles where they can co-think and codesign activities and lessons with faculty, as well as provide insights to faculty about the students in the class and the learning environment. Interviews with LAs and faculty members, in addition to video from weekly preparation sessions, illustrate the different types of partnerships that can evolve between LAs and faculty and help us understand the roles different factors play in these partnerships. We contrast three different types of partnerships between LAs and faculty that exist along a continuum: mentor-mentee, faculty-driven collaboration, and collaborative. This data highlights the importance and the benefits of being attentive to these partnerships in developing a robust and effective LA Program. 

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