Teachers' responses to children's eye gaze

Abstract

When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham & Doyle 2002), suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children’s thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching interactions were analysed to determine teachers’ responses to different patterns of children’s eye gaze. In Study 2 a different group of teachers completed a questionnaire assessing teachers’ awareness of GA in determining children’s thinking, understanding and interest. Results showed that teachers did not typically respond to children’s GA in predicted ways and did not associate GA with children’s thinking. However when asked explicitly about GA cues they made predictions relating to question difficulty and children’s thinking in line with empirical work (Doherty-Sneddon et al., 2002). We conclude that whilst teachers have an implicit understanding of GA cues, they typically do not make full use of such cues during classroom teaching.