Body in motion, attention in focus: A virtual reality study on teachers' movement patterns and noticing

When people navigate a space to perform tasks, their body and eye movements are closely linked. Within the classroom context, characteristics of teachers' body movements may be related to the noticing of relevant classroom events, in particular, visual attention to student disruptions. In the current study, we investigated this relationship in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) classroom that offered a standardized environment for tracking teachers' body and eye movements. Based on time series data collected during a short teaching task with 21 preservice teachers, we conducted K-means clustering with body movement features. We identified three distinctive patterns, which we labeled as immobile, anchored, and dynamic (body) movement patterns. Teachers with dynamic movement patterns venture away from the teacher's desk to far corners of the room; they don't dwell in one location for long but rather move continuously to various parts of the classroom, creating a dispersed movement. Dynamic movement patterns were associated with the best visual attention performance, defined as the number, speed, and duration of fixations on a classroom disruption. Our findings demonstrate the existence of unique and differentiable movement patterns among preservice teachers that have implications for teacher noticing, teacher-student interaction, and instructional quality.