Leveraging Eye Tracking Technology to Improve Teacher Education

Overview & Synopsis

Teacher educators use various measures to gauge pre-service teachers' knowledge, skills, and attitudes, including behavioral measures, self-report questionnaires, and interviews. These measures often fail to capture the granularities of the teaching and learning processes. As such, there has been a burgeoning and recent interest in the use of biometrics like eye tracking technology in teacher education. Eye tracking, as an objective measure, provides important insights to prepare pre-service teachers for addressing learner differences and developing engaging online and blended instruction, both of which seem critical during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, one of the key goals for teacher education to achieve by 2025 is to expand the integration of eye tracking technology into teacher education. To fulfill this goal, the following steps are envisioned: 1) more eye tracking research in teacher education; 2) more use of eye tracking as a teaching tool; 3) more eye tracking instruction in graduate-level teacher education; 4) more teacher education programs having access to eye tracking technology. For successful implementation, training and research experience are needed to scaffold teacher education students to understand and integrate this technology into their teaching and research practices. Interdisciplinary collaborations are also encouraged among researchers in teacher education and other disciplines to overcome obstacles associated with access to the eye tracking technology.