EYE TRACKING THE BEHAVIOR OF LEARNERS WITH DIFFERENT LEVEL OF EXPERTISE IN A SIMULATION-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Eye tracking is increasingly being used in Educational Science and so has the interest of the eye tracking community grown in this topic. In this study we used eye-tracking technology to investigate students' visual behavior while working with computer simulations. Our goal was to investigate the differences between experienced and inexperienced users' behavior. Four participants were examined, two senior undergraduate Physics students that were assigned into the experienced group and two 3rd grade of Greek middle-school students that were assigned into the inexperienced group. All participants were given two PhET Physics simulations accompanied by the corresponding worksheets. The cursor on the screen in the first one was controlled with the mouse movement, while in the second one with the iris movement. A GP3 eye tracker was used to record each participant's eye movements. The results reveal that all users found the eye-control method way more interesting, even though both have faced difficulties to accurately control the simulation. Also, it seems that the experienced users tend to fixate directly on the resulting output right after they change the inputs from the control panels, while the inexperienced ones seem to gaze to the represented phenomenon, trying to realize the effect that change had.