Audience attention in classroom peer presentations as a situated, role-dependent, and evaluative process

Peer presentations are widely used to promote active learning, oral communication, and peer interaction. Existing research has mainly examined presenters' performance, learning outcomes, and anxiety, while less attention has been paid to how non-presenting peers experience and regulate attention. Drawing on classroom attention, mind wandering, self-regulation, and student engagement research, this study examines audience attention as a situated and role-dependent process in peer-led instruction.

This study adopted a grounded theory-informed qualitative design to develop a context-sensitive process model of audience attention during classroom peer presentations. Data included classroom observations, 16 semi-structured interviews, and 72 written narratives collected shortly after presentation sessions. Rather than treating these accounts as direct measurements of real-time attention, the analysis examined participants' perceived, recalled, and reconstructed attentional experiences through iterative coding, constant comparison, and triangulation.

Participants described audience attention as a dynamic, evaluative, and recursive process shaped by the social and epistemic conditions of peer-led instruction. Participants moved among focused engagement, intermittent attention, surface monitoring, and disengagement. Attentional investment was shaped by topic relevance, delivery accessibility, instructional legitimacy, internal vulnerability, and accountability cues. Disruption prompted minimal-cost self-regulation, externally triggered re-engagement, or disengagement when perceived instructional value was low. Evaluative outcomes were retrospectively linked to later expectations across presentation episodes.

The proposed model extends attention and engagement research by showing how general attentional mechanisms are reorganized in peer-led instructional contexts, where knowledge authority is provisional, accountability is comparatively weak, and audience members act as learners, peers, and evaluators. The findings highlight the need to consider audience experience, presentation quality, and instructional design when implementing peer presentations.