Measuring Teachers' Visual Expertise Using the Gaze Relational Index Based on Real-world Eye-tracking Data and Varying Velocity Thresholds

Abstract: This article adds to the understanding of teachers' visual expertise by measuring visual information processing in real-world classrooms (mobile eye-tracking) with the newly introduced Gaze Relational Index (GRI) metric, which is defined as the ratio of mean fixation duration to mean fixation number. In addition, the aim was to provide a methodological contribution to future research by showing to what extent the selected configurations (i.e. varying velocity thresholds and fixation merging) of the eye movement event detection algorithm for detecting fixations and saccades influence the results of eye-tracking studies. Our study leads to two important take-home messages: First, by following a novice-expert paradigm (2 novice teachers & 2 experienced teachers), we found that the GRI can serve as a sensitive measure of visual expertise. As hypothesized, experienced teachers' GRI was lower, suggesting that their more fine-graded organization of domain-specific knowledge allows them to fixate more rapidly and frequently in the classroom. Second, we found that the selected velocity threshold parameter alter and, in the worst case, bias the results of an eye-tracking study. Therefore, in the interest of further generalizability of the results within visual expertise research, we emphasize that it is highly important to report configurations that are relevant for the identification of eye movements.