How catchy are own eye-gaze replays? A Qualitative Study Exploring the Use of Students’ Eye-Gaze Stimulated Retrospectives in Organic Chemistry – i-GAZE

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nicole Graulich
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; Organic Molecular Chemistry - Synthesis and Characterisation
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453926661

In organic chemistry various visually complex representations are used that require learners to decode the perceptual and conceptual information and appropriately link it to the problem context. This represents a huge challenge for learners whose approaches are surface-oriented which results in a lack of deep cognitive processing. When working with organic representations, learners have often little awareness where they have to look at and what type of implicit information they have to infer from the representations.Different instructional approaches are reasonable to support students in solving visually and cognitive complex tasks. On the one hand, one, well reported, instructional strategy, is to reduce the cognitive load by making problem solving with representations accessible through worked-examples. Another line of research, in the other hand, focuses on metacognition and emphasizes student awareness of their individual approaches through self-reflection. As tracking the eye movement provides insights into the problem solvers’ decoding process, both instructional approaches might profit from using this technology. In the context of worked-examples, learners are provided with the eye-gaze replays of a successful problem solver. Research suggests that this eye-movement modelling technique helps students to calibrate their productive or unproductive visual strategies, e.g. realizing missed cues of the representations, and thus to change their eye gaze accordingly to the modeler. Although this cueing technique shows promising results in terms of performance, the underlying process of why students adopt a specify eye-gaze behavior, how they adopt it and if they attend to specific features, is still unknown. Another strategy, following the idea of students’ self-reflection, to support them adopt a more successful problem-solving behavior, is to use students’ own eye-gaze replays. This could help them gain awareness of their approach and offers the opportunity to recalibrate one’s own behavior. Compared to the extensive research on eye-movement modelling examples, investigating to what extend a learner can make sense of its own eye-gaze replay and if such a reflection affects their problem-solving performance or a recalibration of the eye-gaze pattern, is less researched for visual complex representations used in organic chemistry. In this study, we plan to investigate to what features students in organic chemistry attend to when retrospectively cued by their own eye-gaze replay and to what extend this affects their problem-solving performance. The results of this study will improve our understanding of students’ interactions with eye-gaze displays in organic chemistry and inform the application of formative eye-gaze feedback in new smart technologies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozent Dr. Sascha Bernholt