The present study investigates teacher diagnostic skills when observing student engagement and inferring to underlying student characteristic profiles. Five student profiles as empirically determined in previous studies are selected: three incoherent (overestimating, uninterested, and underestimating) and two coherent (strong and struggling) profiles. Teacher professional vision and underlying assumptions about processes of noticing and reasoning about the chosen diagnostic situation serve as a conceptual basis. In the empirical study (N = 41 participants), it is investigated to what extent expert and novice teachers differ with regard to judgment accuracy of underlying student profiles, observed student cues used for judgment, and teacher gaze as perceptual indicator. The study task involved observing a video clip and diagnosing five marked students based on their underlying profiles. First, findings of the study suggest that expert teachers are more accurate in judging incoherent profiles compared to novices. Second, both novices as well as experts state valid behavioral cues when inferring from student engagement to underlying student profile. Third, experts spend more teacher gaze on student profiles which might need adaptive pedagogical action (struggling, underestimating, uninterested student). The study provides first evidence on teacher gaze during the professional task of diagnosing individual students in the process of teaching. Regarding the conceptual model of teacher professional vision teacher gaze can serve as an additional operationalization of the noticing component of teacher professional vision.

Student participation and cognitive and emotional engagement in learning activities play a key role in student academic achievement and are driven by student motivational characteristics such as academic self-concept. These relations have been well established with variable-centered analyses, but in this study, a person-centered analysis was applied to describe how the different aspects of student engagement are combined within individual students. Specifically, we investigated how the number of hand-raisings interacts with student cognitive and emotional engagement in various engagement patterns. Additionally, it was analyzed how these engagement patterns relate to academic self-concept as an antecedent and achievement as an outcome. In an empirical study, high school students (N = 397) from 20 eighth-grade classrooms were surveyed and videotaped during one mathematics school lesson. The design included a pre- and post-test, with the videotaping occurring in between. Five within-student engagement patterns were identified by latent profile analysis: disengaged, compliant, silent, engaged, and busy. Students with higher academic self-concept were more likely to show a pattern of moderate to high engagement. Compared with students with low engagement, students with higher engagement patterns gained systematically in end-of-year achievement. These findings illustrate the power of person-centered analyses to illuminate the complexity of student engagement. They imply the need for differentiation beyond disengaged and engaged students and bring along the recognition that being engaged can take on various forms, from compliant to busy.

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Teachers' ability to assess student cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics is a requirement to support individual students with adaptive teaching. However, teachers have difficulty in assessing the diversity among their students in terms of the intra-individual combinations of these characteristics in student profiles. Reasons for this challenge are assumed to lie in the behavioral and cognitive activities behind judgment processes. Particularly, the observation and utilization of diagnostic student cues, such as student engagement, might be an important factor. Hence, we investigated how student teachers with high and low judgment accuracy differ with regard to their eye movements as a behavioral and utilization of student cues as a cognitive activity. Forty-three participating student teachers observed a video vignette showing parts of a mathematics lesson to assess student characteristics of five target students, and reported which cues they used to form their judgment. Meanwhile, eye movements were tracked. Student teachers showed substantial diversity in their judgment accuracy. Those with a high judgment accuracy showed slight tendencies toward a more “experienced” pattern of eye movements with a higher number of fixations and shorter average fixation duration. Although all participants favored diagnostic student cues for their assessments, an epistemic network analysis indicated that student teachers with a high judgment accuracy utilized combinations of diagnostic student cues that clearly pointed to specific student profiles. Those with a low judgment accuracy had difficulty using distinct combinations of diagnostic cues. Findings highlight the power of behavioral and cognitive activities in judgment processes for explaining teacher performance of judgment accuracy.

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