Abstract
The use of eye-tracking with the goal to help to reveal cognitive strategies while solving science (physics, biology, chemistry) problems is still quite rare, although it was successfully applied in many other research fields including human computer interaction and of course e-business. Usually eye-tracking is adopted to examine human visual attention.
In general, eye fixation location reflects attention and eye fixation duration reflects processing difficulty and amount of attention. Besides, according some studies, scan path patterns exhibit individuals' cognitive strategies utilized in goal-oriented tasks.
The eye tracking based research, presented in this article, was proposed, designed a realized by experienced researchers, who deal with neurophysiologic aspects of human computer interactions since 2002. In this paper they introduce the methodology (SSRD), and also revealed behavioural and problem solving patterns of students and teachers, while working with physics applets in virtual laboratories.
Authors present individual differences as well as different problem solving patterns and even different cognitive strategies. They compare the effectiveness and efficiency of different individual approaches and bring some interesting conclusions.