The purpose of this study was to investigate “Where teacher's eyes are aimed in sports techniques teaching” by analyzing relationships between recognition and visual search patterns of teachers in the evaluation of the children's mat stunt performances.
An application software was developed with Power Macintosh 5500/225 to display the motion pictures of children's mat stunts and questions about their performances at the same time on a screen. The VTR images and questions were displayed on a screen with a multimedia projector. Thirty subjects, fifteen expert teachers and fifteen novice teachers, were asked to reply to the questions. Their answers and eye fixations during the experiment were recorded with Eye Mark Recorder and a VTR.
The expert teachers pointed out more technical problems and gave more advice on the children's performances than the novices. The experts pointed out the dynamic aspects of the problems, and their comments were more concrete than those of the novices. The expert teachers showed less total eye fixations than the novice teachers. However, the expert teachers showed more fixation percentages on the specific locations which were critical to good performance.
These results suggested that it was important for the novice teachers to recognize the dynamic aspects of the skill, and to observe more critical points relating to a good performance in teaching of the children's performances.