Just Look at Them! Encouraging Self-Reflection on Teacher Gaze Behavior through Data Visualizations in Virtual Reality

Virtual classroom simulations are an exciting avenue to give teachers a way to reflect on their teaching behavior, in particular, nonverbal behavior. In two within-participants studies, we explore how visualizing participants' gaze, using four different data visualizations, affected participants' behaviors and self-reflection in an immersive virtual reality classroom simulation. We compared a Control condition with no data visualization, an updating Bar Graph over each "student" agent head, and two Fade-In/Fade-Out conditions where the opacity of "students" changed based on whether they were in the field of view of the participant. We found that participants preferred the Bar Graph visualizations, and this condition changed participants' behavior the most compared to the Control condition. We discuss design implications for virtual classroom simulations as a self-reflection tool for teachers.