Expert and novice mathematics teachers’ visual attention to students with different characteristics during instruction: insights from an eye-tracking study

Abstract Despite growing interest in teachers’ professional noticing, research on how mathematics teachers attend to students with differences in achievements and other aspects during instruction remains limited. This case study addresses this gap by using eye tracking to examine how an expert and a novice mathematics teacher visually attend to students with various characteristics in the classroom. Two female mathematics teachers from prominent middle schools in Beijing (China)—one expert and one novice—were observed while teaching two lessons to their eighth-grade students. Their gaze during classes was recorded using Tobii Pro Glasses 2, followed by video-based reflections to gain insights into their visual focus. In both classes, three groups of students—strong, intermediate, and struggling—were identified based on the teachers’ perception of their cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics. Results show that the expert teacher distributed attention evenly across all groups during lessons, while the novice teacher focused primarily on strong students, then intermediate, and least on struggling students. However, during the introduction phase, the expert teacher directed more attention to struggling students and the novice teacher’s attention became more balanced. Additionally, both teachers shifted their focus within the same groups, but significant transitions between strong and struggling or intermediate students occurred only in the expert teacher’s lessons. In contrast, the novice teacher often returned to strong students after focusing on intermediate ones, or transitioned between intermediate and struggling students.