Seminar on mathematical perception through the lens of a dual eye-tracker

Visual representations are an essential part of mathematical concepts; at the same time, extensive evidence exposes that novices and experts perceive visual material differently. The first part of the presentation was dedicated to expert-novice differences in mathematical perception, while the second part exemplified the complexity of the student-tutor collaboration during the teaching-learning process.Our multimodal data from the student-tutor pairs include dual eye-tracking data,video of gestures and audio of verbal utterances. A micro-ethnographical analysis of two episodes, namely learning of Cartesian coordinates and an embodied exploration of a parabola as the locus of all points equidistant from a given point and a line, revealed strong coordination between student’s and tutor’s perception-action processes. Visual joint attention appears to be a valuable theoretical construct that allows researchers to follow and to understand the dynamics and effectiveness of the student-tutor collaboration. However, the data question the constructs of following versus leading joint attention and bring supporting evidence of joint attention as an emerging state of student-tutor collaboration.