The Validation of Eye-Tracking Behaviors of Experts and Novices While Viewing Multiple Representations of Chemistry Concepts
Faculty Mentor(s)
Dr. Justin M. Shorb, Chemistry
Document Type
Poster
Event Date
4-21-2017
Abstract
Education research has often interrogated the differences in mental schema between Experts and Novices in a particular discipline. These mental schema, or organizations of ideas and thoughts within a person's brain, can give insight into which connections are essential for complete understanding of a field of study. For instance, in chemistry, it has been found that experts more readily connect chemical concepts visualized in macroscopic, symbolic, and sub-microscopic representations. This triplet relationship has been studied repeatedly in the literature, but requires active think-aloud studies or a series of tests which involve a certain extent of non-natural activity. Eye-tracking has been increasingly used in educational research in order to gain insight into how we interpret information in a passive observational manner. Making use of the triplet relationship, an experiment has been conducted to replicate the expert/novice study conducted by Kozma and Russell in 1997 by using eye-tracking while having participants perform a sorting task. Similar results for the sorting task will validate the interpretation of the eye-tracking analysis methods for future use.
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