Student Teachers’ and Experienced Teachers’ Professional Vision of Students’ Understanding of the Rational Number Concept

How does technology challenge teacher education?

The paper presents an overview of challenges and demands related to teachers' digital skills and technology integration into educational content and processes. The paper raises a debate how technologies have created new skills gaps in pre-service and in-service teacher training and how that affected traditional forms of teacher education. Accordingly, it is discussed what interventions might be applicable to different contexts to address these challenges. It is argued that technologies should be viewed both as the field where new competences should be developed and at the same time as the method used in developing learning environments for teacher students.

On enhancing students' cognitive abilities in online learning using brain activity and eye movements

The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted education institutions in over 150 nations, affecting billions of students. Many governments have forced a transition in higher education from in-person to remote learning. After this abrupt, worldwide transition away from the classroom, some question whether online education will continue to grow in acceptance in post-pandemic times. However, new technology, such as the brain-computer interface and eye-tracking, have the potential to improve the remote learning environment, which currently faces several obstacles and deficiencies. Cognitive brain computer interfaces can help us develop a better understanding of brain functions, allowing for the development of more effective learning methodologies and the enhancement of brain-based skills. We carried out a systematic literature review of research on the use of brain computer interfaces and eye-tracking to measure students' cognitive skills during online learning. We found that, because many experimental tasks depend on recorded rather than real-time video, students don't have direct and real-time interaction with their teacher. Further, we found no evidence in any of the reviewed papers for brain-to-brain synchronization during remote learning. This points to a potentially fruitful future application of brain computer interfaces in education, investigating whether the brains of student-teacher pairs who interact with the same course content have increasingly similar brain patterns.

Investigating Visual Perception in Teaching and Learning with Advanced Eye-Tracking Methodologies: Rewards and Challenges of an Innovative Research Paradigm

In this discussion paper, teaching and learning are characterized as being situated, complex, and reciprocally interactive activities. Accordingly, a teacher’s pedagogical actions are always action and reaction at the same time. Irrespective of the reciprocally interactive nature of teaching and learning, educational research has sought to identify characteristics of teacher expertise that enable teachers to influence students’ learning in a systematic and positive way. In this respect, the contributions to this special issue offer an innovative research paradigm, because they bring together different and originally separated strands of research: (1) research on professional vision in teacher education, (2) research on the structure and development of expertise in cognitive science, (3) research on cognitive processes by means of eye-tracking technologies in psychology, and (4) research on educational effectiveness and instructional quality in educational science. Following this introduction, a detailed discussion of the rewards and challenges of each of the seven contributions is provided. This discussion leads to the following conclusions: (a) The emphasis on the “reacting teacher” in professional vision research undervalues the role of lesson planning for the flexible handling of sudden events during class instruction. (b) The assumption of professional vision as mediator between a teacher’s knowledge and pedagogical actions overlooks that teachers can sometimes do more than they can tell. (c) Not all of the gaze behavior that is currently studied needs to be instructed. (d) Research should move beyond explorative expert-novice comparisons to hypotheses-driven designs that investigate how teachers can learn to successfully apply evidence-based pedagogical principles.