This study investigated the effect of classroom settings on teacher-student interaction in higher education by comparing the behavioural sequences in smart classrooms (SCs) and traditional multimedia classrooms (TMCs). Twenty in-classroom teaching sessions were randomly selected from six universities in South China, involving 1,043 students and 23 teachers. Half of the sessions were taken in SCs as the experimental group, and half were in TMCs as the control group. A teacher-student interaction behaviour coding schema was developed, and a total of 17,805 observable behaviours were collected and coded sequentially via a review of classroom videos. Then, the behavior pattern diagram was set up to visualise a lag sequential analysis results by four themes, namely teacher-talk, teacher-action, student-talk and student-action. Results show that compared to TMCs, the SCs triggered significantly more self-initiated student actions and student-driven teacher talk, while teacher-initiated talk decreased significantly, indicating that students’ autonomy was strengthened in the SC. Furthermore, teachers’ workload was somewhat reduced, and they obtained more support with trying new pedagogies with mobile terminals in the data-rich environment. These findings provide evidence to validate the effect of SCs on increasing teacher-student interaction and strengthening the students’ dominant position.
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the individual difference on digital reading, by examining the eye-tracking records of male and female readers with different reading ability (including their pupil size, blink rate, fixation rate, fixation duration, saccade rate, saccade duration, saccade amplitude and regression rate).
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 74 participants were selected according to 6,520 undergraduate students’ university entrance exam scores and the follow-up reading assessments. Half of them are men and half are women, with the top 3% good readers and the bottom 3% poor readers, from different disciplines.
Findings
Results indicated that the major gender differences on reading abilities were indicated by saccade duration, regression rate and blink rate. The major effects on reading ability have a larger effect size than the major effect on gender. Among all the indicators that have been examined, blink rate and regression rates are the most sensitive to the gender attribute, while the fixation rate and saccade amplitude showed the least sensitiveness.
Originality/value
This finding could be helpful for user modeling with eye-tracking data in intelligent tutoring systems, where necessary adjustments might be needed according to users’ individual differences. In this way, instructors could be able to provide purposeful guidance according to what the learners had seen and personalized the experience of digital reading.
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