Looking Through the Teacher’s Eyes: Effects of Eye Movement Modeling Examples on Learning to Solve Procedural Problems

Abstract

Learning by watching the good example of others is a very natural and effective way of learning. Nowadays, we can view examples of experts from over the whole world by means of video examples. This dissertation describes research about a new type of video examples, so-called eye movement modeling examples (EMME), in which learners not only see what a teacher is doing on the computer but also see where he or she looks at. This is done by recording the teacher’s eye movements and depicting them as a moving colored circle or dot. Showing where the teacher looks serves two purposes: It guides the learner’s attention towards the right place at the right time which makes the explanation of the teacher easier to understand, and it provides insight into which information the teacher uses to perform the task and which strategy he or she uses (something which usually remains invisible). Previous research showed that EMME (compared with regular video examples without the depiction of the teacher’s eye movements) improved the performance on visual search tasks and classification tasks. In his dissertation Tim van Marlen examined whether EMME can also improve learning to solve procedural problems, such as geometry problems. His research showed that EMME indeed help to guide the learner’s attention towards the right place at the right time. In addition, secondary education students performed better at solving geometry problems after studying EMME than students studying regular video examples.