Publication
Entropy Based Transition Analysis of Eye Movement on Physics Representational Competence
Seyyed Saleh Mozaffari Chanijani; Pascal Klein; Syed Saqib Bukhari; Jochen Kuhn; Andreas Dengel
In: Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind. International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp-16), September 12-16, Heidelberg, Germany, ACM, 2016.
Abstract
In this paper, we have conducted an eye tracking experiment by employing an inexpensive, lightweight, and portable eye tracker paired with a tablet. Students were instructed to solve the physics problems by presenting them three coherent representations about a phenomenon: Vectorial representations, data tables and diagrams. The effectiveness of each representation was assessed for three levels of student expertise (experts, intermediates and novices) using entropy-based transition analysis of the gaze data. The results show that students of different skill level (a) prefer different representations for problem-solving, (b) switch between representations with different frequencies, and (c) can be distinguished by the density of representation use. The obtained results confirm earlier findings of physics education research quantitatively which were initially obtained by student interviews and observational studies.