Blind Spot in Science Class

Eye contact is the most important of various factors in social communication. Social communication is the most important factor in science class in nowadays. According to constructivism, learning process is interaction of cognitive and social factor in class with student’s environment, such as colleague, culture, and teacher. At this point of time, we have a question, “Teacher is being done social communication with all of student in science class?” Generally, gaze is concentrated right or left, front or rear in one’s sight. Also, in social interaction, interaction between student and teacher in lecture style learning is less than learning need to student’s action. At this reason, teacher can’t provide equal opportunity of eye contact with all of student. Therefore, we have a hypothesis, “There are blind spot (student don’t have eye contact with teacher) in science lecture class (instructor-led)” To verify our hypothesis, we recruited 6 science teachers on a public high school in Korea. All of subjects divided two groups by class name; group A was teaching class A, group B was teaching class B. Gaze tracking to acquire eye movement data 6 teacher was performed science lecture with mobile eye tracker, and we analyze gaze fixation rate on all of AOIs (3 instructive zone, 9 student zone, etc. zone) to find existence of blind spot in science class gaze fixation rate. Eye tracker is affected to teacher be in teaching, such as inconvenience. To solve this problem, teachers were trained by researchers until they have not feeling about inconvenience of eye tracker wearing. Also, teacher gaze can be affected by self-consciousness of gaze tracking for oneself. To offset this interference, we did double blind test to all of teacher and student; they can’t know the time of real data collection. Finally, blind spot may be followed by student seat. To find this effect, we did collect gaze data two condition of science lecture; first data collection at before randomly change for student seat, second data collection at after randomly change for student seat. In addition, we performed questionnaire to student each class (3 times per 1 class) and each teacher.As a result of this study, there are blind spots on student zone in science lecture, but it is a little difference as each teacher. Besides, there is difference of consciousness about blind spot (student don’t have eye contact with teacher) in science between students and teachers. Consequently, teacher cannot provide equal opportunity of social communication with all of student. This study has some restriction to generalize a existence of blind spot in science lecture for small group size. Therefore, we need to more study related to this study to generalize blind spot in science class. Research to find different of between lecture style and inquiry style in science learning is needed also.