Teachers' prioritisation of quiet and disruptive student disengagement in a mouse tracking study
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Teachers must decide which students need support when several classroom demands compete for a response. This study examined support prioritisation when quiet and disruptive disengagement were explicitly presented. Forty practising teachers completed an online two-alternative forced-choice mouse-tracking task with 32 formal trials across quiet and noisy classroom environments. No statistically reliable overall disruptive-choice advantage was detected, and the noisy environment did not significantly increase disruptive selections. Adjusted models of log response time indicated shorter total response time and post-initiation intervals in the noisy condition; unadjusted participant-level mean-difference intervals included zero. Reconstructed maximum deviation and absolute net trajectory area showed no reliable environment or final-selection effects. An exploratory pooled drift-diffusion model described a starting point slightly closer to the disruptive boundary and drift toward the quiet boundary, but participant bootstrap uncertainty and fit diagnostics limited mechanistic interpretation. No environment-specific diffusion parameter survived adjustment across four comparisons. The findings concern explicit support choices between two displayed profiles. They do not establish equivalent preferences or describe which students teachers would spontaneously notice in a live classroom.
Author: Beiyi Cai
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7225185706