Attentive fidelity and the coordination of attentive and conceptual processes in learning from mathematics videos lessons

This study examined the relationship between students' visual attention and their mathematical reasoning during video-based instruction. Applying a mixed methods contrasting case design, we investigated two undergraduate students' perceptual behaviors using the construct of attentive fidelity , which quantifies the alignment between viewers' gaze patterns and conceptually germane features of a video. We analyzed eye-tracking data to characterize each student's attentive patterns and conducted semi-structured interviews to probe the meanings students constructed from watching the videos. Results indicate that students differed systematically in the extent to which their attention aligned with conceptually critical moments. Episodes of higher attentive fidelity were associated with more integrated and conceptually coherent reasoning across multiple mathematical representations. The findings offer insight into connections between students' attention and learning, suggest implications for the design of instructional videos, and highlight attentive fidelity as an extension to existing eye-tracking methodologies for studying students' cognition in video-based learning contexts. • Attentive fidelity describes students' attentive behavior for instructional videos. • Different students attend to key perceptual phenomena at different rates. • Data suggests a potential (positive) relationship between attentive fidelity and learning. • Attentive fidelity suggests connections between attention and thinking.