Teacher-vision

Inside School Research reports on work comparing the eye motions of new and experienced teachers:

The newcomers, for instance, tend to engage more often in "cognitive tunneling." That is, they focus longer and more often on a single student. The veterans, in contrast, tend to take in the entire room most of the time. In one such pair of expert-novice teachers, the younger teacher spent 20 percent of her time focusing on one of the 27 children in the class. The more experienced teacher, in comparison, never focused on a single student more than 9 percent of the time.

I'd love to know a bit more, especially about how the researchers handled differences between teachers standing traditionally at the front of classrooms and teachers circulating among smaller groups of students.

And yet, what leapt to mind for me was on-line teaching. If classroom experience builds up the ability to take in quick visual indications of how students are doing, what changes when all that visual information is replaced by e-mail and completed classwork?