What Are Students Doing While You Are Trying to Teach?

Engaging students in class is paramount if they are to gain a deep understanding of the content presented by instructors. This engagement is demonstrated by student attention to the various components of class instruction. However, there is little research at the college level that focuses on what aspects of instruction are related to increases/decreases in student attention during class. To initiate research into student engagement during instruction, we collected multiple streams of data that we think can provide us with a measure of student attention. We had students in introductory science courses wear hats, each with a camera mounted on the brim, to provide us with a record of the general location of student gaze (i.e., looking at the board, notes, friends). We also had participating students use electronic pens that allowed us to record what information students transferred into their notes during class (pencasts). These two streams of data could be synced via recorded audio tracks such that throughout class we know what the instructor is doing, where the student is focusing their visual attention and what information they are transferring to their notes. These data were collected from approximately eight students in each of three 50-minute class sessions for both Introductory Biology and Organic Chemistry. While we are still at the early phases of analysis, initial results indicate there are significant amounts of time during each class where student visual attention is not directed toward the instructor or content being presented. We attempted to visually compare student attention to instructor activity and there are indications of periods where many participants simultaneously lose attention. Our initial coding attempts indicate that some students may be ‘off task’ for nearly one quarter of the class. The pencasts revealed significant variability in the amount of notes transferred by students listening to the same lecture. We were also able to calculate the time lag between when the instructors made a statement and when students completed transfer of that information into their notes. Our concern was that if there is significant lag, then this may push the limits of students’ working memories. While this work is in the initial stages, we believe that analysis of extant data and expansion of data collection to more contexts will yield interesting insights on the relationship between course instruction and student attention.