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Recent advances in eye-tracking technology afford the possibility to collect rich data on attentional focus in a wide variety of settings outside the lab. However, apart from anecdotal reports, it is not clear how to maximize the validity of these data and prevent data loss from tracking failures. Particularly helpful in developing these techniques would be to describe the prevalence and causes of tracking failures in authentic environments. To meet this goal, we analyzed video records aligned with eye-tracking data collected from screen-mounted eye trackers employed in a middle-school classroom. Our sample includes records from 35 students recorded during multiple eye-tracking sessions. We compared student head position, body posture, attentiveness, and social interactions for time periods associated with successful and unsuccessful eye tracking. Overall, we observed substantial data loss and found that student inattentiveness, movements toward the eye tracker, and head rotations were the most prevalent factors inducing data loss. In addition, we observed a substantial relationship between data loss and apparent low involvement in the learning task. These data suggest that eye-tracking data loss is an important problem and that it can present a threat to validity because it can bias datasets to overrepresent high involvement behaviors. Based on these findings, we present several recommendations for increasing the proportion of usable data and to counter possible biases that data loss may introduce.

Instructional discussion is a teaching method used in many classrooms across grade levels. In fact, the Common Core State Standards promote the use of instructional discussion in secondary classrooms (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2018a). Students, however, are not always taught best practices for engaging in a discussion and may feel unprepared to participate. As a result, discussions may not produce the dynamic learning opportunity they are intended to foster. This essay provides 10 tips for high school teachers to prepare students in the high school classroom to engage in a meaningful classroom discussion effectively in order to ensure students are learning and are engaged in a productive manner while meeting the demands of the Common Core Standards.

Although eye tracking has been used extensively to assess cognitions for static stimuli, recent research suggests that the link between gaze and cognition may be more tenuous for dynamic stimuli such as videos. Part of the difficulty in convincingly linking gaze with cognition is that in dynamic stimuli, gaze position is strongly influenced by exogenous cues such as object motion. However, tests of the gaze-cognition link in dynamic stimuli have been done on only a limited range of stimuli often characterized by highly organized motion. Also, analyses of cognitive contrasts between participants have been mostly been limited to categorical contrasts among small numbers of participants that may have limited the power to observe more subtle influences. We, therefore, tested for cognitive influences on gaze for screen-captured instructional videos, the contents of which participants were tested on. Between-participant scanpath similarity predicted between-participant similarity in responses on test questions, but with imperfect consistency across videos. We also observed that basic gaze parameters and measures of attention to centers of interest only inconsistently predicted learning, and that correlations between gaze and centers of interest defined by other-participant gaze and cursor movement did not predict learning. It, therefore, appears that the search for eye movement indices of cognition during dynamic naturalistic stimuli may be fruitful, but we also agree that the tyranny of dynamic stimuli is real, and that links between eye movements and cognition are highly dependent on task and stimulus properties.

The willingness and flexibility of university instructors to comply with and provide accommodations for students with disabilities is critical to academic success. The authors examine how communication between students needing accommodations and university instructors impacts instructor self-efficacy, or instructors' perception that they can meet the accommodation. Specifically, the authors' explored the relationship between student self-disclosure of a disability and instructor empathy, flexibility, and self-efficacy in meeting student accommodation needs. Results revealed that the more a student self-discloses about a needed accommodation, the more self-efficacy an instructor has in making that accommodation. For the low-disclosure condition, empathy and flexibility were both significant predictors of self-efficacy, whereas, for the high-disclosure condition, only flexibility was a significant predictor of self-efficacy. Finally, instructors' levels of empathy and flexibility both decreased after reading both the high and low self-disclosure scenarios.

Cassandra Book called on scholars to examine how communication was taught in K-12 classrooms. For nearly 30 years, scholars have expressed concern regarding the decline of K-12 communication scholarship (Hunt et al., 2014), argued for the importance of communication in K-12 teacher certification (Rudick & Dannels, 2020; Wright, 2020), and most recently, advocated for the National Communication Association's (NCA) involvement in developing a K-12 communication pedagogy research agenda (Yastremski & Morreale, 2021). In their article, Yastremski and Morreale's (2021) proposed four strategies for advancing scholarship and advocacy in this realm. This essay will address their first strategy, which asks scholars to develop a communication pedagogy K-12 research agenda.

Teachers and their unions are often vilified for the perception that they are working against the best interest of students (Berliner & Glass, 2014). The narrative, it seems, is that teachers' unions only seek to protect bad teachers, and they fight for an unearned increase in pay for teachers. The National Education Association launched the Go Red for Ed campaign, which is an awareness campaign designed to promote the need to provide students with school environments that enable learning, give teachers a voice in educational policy, and provide equitable opportunities for students of all backgrounds (National Education Association, 2019). In doing so, educators and allies in several states have successfully engaged in protests and strikes to advocate for education. In this essay, the author examines the history and politics of teacher labor, which they define as the broad working conditions of and work done by teachers, especially as they navigate the standardized system of government accountability present in K-12 education today. The author describes teacher labor as it is impacted by government accountability movements in education. Specifically, they discuss teacher working conditions, the de-skilling of teachers, teacher dissatisfaction, and teacher shortages. Further, the author explores the implications of the accountability movement including harms to student learning and teacher autonomy while suggesting pathways for communication education researchers to address these concerns.

Although several research programs have explored how people track changes in objects over time, it is not clear how consistently people are aware of the precise state of dynamic scenes. The importance of object tracking is put to a particularly interesting test in cinema, where editors must combine different views of dynamically changing objects (such as actors) in a way that does not disrupt viewers' perceptual experience. Film editors' intuition and several recent studies suggest that viewers precisely track configuration changes over time and that temporal overlaps in the depiction of moving objects facilitates viewers' perception of smooth visual event continuity. We tested these hypotheses by showing large numbers of participants short edited films that varied in temporal matching between views. In several experiments, we found that participants judged a wide range of temporal overlaps (from 400 ms overlaps to 400 ms ellipses) to be equally continuous. Participants did judge 1-second ellipses to be less smooth than exact matches, and when they repeatedly scrutinized films, or compared different versions of the same films, participants discriminated between exact matches and smaller mismatches. We conclude that awareness of temporal mismatches does not always occur by default, and that the importance of precise temporal matching may be overestimated in cinema and in psychological study of event perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruminant animals have a symbiotic relationship with the microorganisms in their rumens. In this relationship, rumen microbes efficiently degrade complex plant-derived compounds into smaller digestible compounds, a process that is very likely associated with host animal feed efficiency. The resulting simpler metabolites can then be absorbed by the host and converted into other compounds by host enzymes. We used a microbial community metabolic network inferred from shotgun metagenomics data to assess how this metabolic system differs between animals that are able to turn ingested feedstuffs into body mass with high efficiency and those that are not. We conducted shotgun sequencing of microbial DNA from the rumen contents of 16 sheep that differed in their residual feed intake (RFI), a measure of feed efficiency. Metagenomic reads from each sheep were mapped onto a database-derived microbial metabolic network, which was linked to the sheep metabolic network by interface metabolites (metabolites transferred from microbes to host). No single enzyme was identified as being significantly different in abundance between the low and high RFI animals (P > 0.05, Wilcoxon test). However, when we analyzed the metabolic network as a whole, we found several differences between efficient and inefficient animals. Microbes from low RFI (efficient) animals use a suite of enzymes closer in network space to the host’s reactions than those of the high RFI (inefficient) animals. Similarly, low RFI animals have microbial metabolic networks that, on average, contain reactions using shorter carbon chains than do those of high RFI animals, potentially allowing the host animals to extract metabolites more efficiently. Finally, the efficient animals possess community networks with greater Shannon diversity among their enzymes than do inefficient ones. Thus, our system approach to the ruminal microbiome identified differences attributable to feed efficiency in the structure of the microbes’ community metabolic network that were undetected at the level of individual microbial taxa or reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, screen-captured instructional videos have become popular tools for learning. Viewers wanting to learn efficiently can play these videos at faster-than-normal speeds, a feature offered by hosting services such as YouTube. Although previous research suggests that moderate speeding may not lessen learning, little research has tested this form of media for speeding-induced learning impairments. Further, even if learning is not impaired by speeding, the degree to which users find speed increases taxing and/or unpleasant is unknown. We therefore created a set of screen-captured instructional videos and tested whether speeding them by up to 250% affected learning, perceived workload, and preferences. Speed increases of up to 200% minimally affected learning, but even modest 150% speed increases substantially increased perceived workload and reduced viewer preferences. However, we were able to create videos that were more selectively speeded by concentrating speeding on pauses and relatively unimportant and slow speech. These videos were just as time efficient as the 150% speeded videos, but viewers preferred them. Our findings demonstrate that speeded instructional videos have the potential to facilitate efficient learning, and they suggest techniques such as selective speeding that may be used to support efficiency while lessening viewer preference costs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).