Student teachers' and experienced teachers’ situation awareness and professional vision in real-life classrooms




Pouta, Maikki; Lehtinen, Erno; Palonen, Tuire

PublisherElsevier BV

2026

 Teaching and Teacher Education

105428

175

0742-051X

1879-2480

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2026.105428

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2026.105428

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/515904974



We developed the integrated model of teacher's attention to examine teachers' a) situation awareness of the overall classroom and b) professional vision of individual pupils. Using mobile eye tracking in real classrooms, we analyzed teachers' eye movements using a novel metric, the Gaze Relational Index. The findings indicated that situation awareness involves shorter and more frequent gazes, while professional vision requires fewer but longer gazes. Experienced teachers showed faster and more varying visual attention compared to student teachers. This study provides valuable insights into visual processing in real-life classrooms, addressing the gap left by previous studies.


This study was financially supported by the Turku University Foundation (080998) and The Finnish Cultural Foundation (85222232) , which were awarded to the first author and by the project funding P-EDU-23-7of the Research Council of Lithuania to the third author.


Last updated on 20/03/2026 12:08:10 PM