"How can we see through students' eyes?": Overview of Contemporary Use of Eye-Tracking in Science Education with Examples of our own Research
Abstrakt
Modern, evidence-based science education heavily depends on data from various tools describ-ing students' behaviour or performance. Until recently, however, the data were more or less burdened by the fact that students remained a black box providing some responses either in a written or an oral way, eventually behaving in a certain way which researchers anyhow cap-tured.
Modern technology has brought another valuable tool which may truly cause revolution in the field of education research. With the use of eye-tracking camera or goggles, we can lit-erally see through students' eyes.
Eye-tracking (ET) has then become a very valuable asset which has the potential to change education from scratch. In this plenary, the ET method will be briefly explained together with its rapid development.
Its procedure and combination with other methods will be explained so that the audience gains general understanding of ET's potential. In addition, preliminary results of a systematic litera-ture review on the use of eye-tracking in science education will be presented.
The results are divided into several thematic parts: research design (between or within-subject, assessment), performance measures (problem tasks, pre- and post-test, response accuracy, mind-wandering signals etc.), the most addressed topics (or reading of learning material, scientific representa-tions, practical work assessment, problem-solving skills evaluation, video instruction evalua-tion) or the most common ET metrics (total fixation duration, fixation count, time to first fixa-tion, number of saccades, saccade length, reading and re-reading time or scan-path pattern). Each will be briefly introduced with one example left for the audience to analyse on their own to get the idea about the data ET provides and also about its potential and limitations.
At the conclusion, future directions of ET will be predicted and further discussed with the audience. They will be challenged to find the use in their field or evaluate to what extent their own theses' research design might benefit from the use of ET.