The Future of Education

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 research fields including problem solving, behavioral and problem solving patterns, human computer interaction, and of course e-business.

Usually eye-tracking is adopted to examine human visual attention based on the eye-mind assumption. 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 neurophysiological aspects of human computer interactions since 2002. In this paper they introduce in details the methodology (SSRD), and also revealed behavioral and problem solving patterns of students and teachers, 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.