Professional vision in grading student gymnastic routines – a comparison of noticing between pre-service teachers, probational and experienced physical education teachers using eye-tracking

Introduction Physical education (PE) teachers have to perceive and process information in highly dynamic, complex situations. Research on teachers’ professional vision indicates differences between novice and expert teachers’ noticing. However, studies in PE, assessing teachers’ perception using quantitative eye-tracking, are lacking. The aim of this study is to analyse how PE teachers’ perception of gymnastics movements varies by teaching experience. Method To this end, we asked pre-service teachers ( n = 36), probational ( n = 21) and experienced PE teachers ( n = 19) without sport-specific judging experience to observe and assess videos of students’ gymnastic floor routines. Gaze was recorded with a stationary eye-tracker. We compared fixation count, duration and stationary Shannon entropy (SSE) as a dispersion measure. Results Descriptive, but not statistically significant group differences were found for fixation count increase, and fixation duration decrease from groups with lowest (pre-service teachers) to the highest (experienced PE teachers) teaching experience. The analysis of SSE revealed a more dispersed fixational pattern in experienced PE teachers than probational teachers and pre-service teachers. Discussion Our study provides initial insight into differently experienced PE teachers’ visual perception during noticing of gymnastic movements. The higher SSE indicates a more dynamic and dispersed fixational pattern in experienced teachers. Collectively, our pattern of findings is more in line with studies on experience differences in professional vision outside of PE and tentatively contrasts with results from experience-dependent studies on visual perception within gymnastics or other sports.