Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 62, March 2013, Pages 208-220
Computers & Education

Tracking learners' visual attention during a multimedia presentation in a real classroom

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.009Get rights and content

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate university learners' visual attention during a PowerPoint (PPT) presentation on the topic of “Dinosaurs” in a real classroom. The presentation, which lasted for about 12–15 min, consisted of 12 slides with various text and graphic formats. An instructor gave the presentation to 21students whose eye movements were recorded by the eye tracking system. Participants came from various science departments in a national university in Taiwan, of which ten were earth-science majors (ES) and the other 11 were assigned to the non-earth-science group (NES). Eye movement indicators, such as total time spent on the interest zone, fixation count, total fixation duration, percent time spent in zone, etc., were abstracted to indicate their visual attention. One-way ANOVA as well as t-test analysis was applied to find the associations between the eye movement data and the students' background as well as different formats of PPT slides. The results showed that the students attended significantly more to the text zones on the PPT slides and the narrations delivered by the instruction. Nevertheless, the average fixation duration, indicating the average information processing time, was longer on the picture zones. In general, the ES students displayed higher visual attention than the NES students to the text zones, but few differences were found for the picture zones. When the students viewed those slides containing scientific hypotheses, the difference in attention distributions between the text and pictures reduced. Further analyses of fixation densities and saccade paths showed that the ES students were better at information decoding and integration.

Highlights

► Students spent more time reading texts and attended more to the text–picture slides. ► Students' information processing behaviors differed for different pictures. ► The effect of prior knowledge was evident mostly in the text zones. ► Fixation densities supported that ES students knew better where to look and survey. ► Students distributed their attention to both PPT presentation and the instructor.

Introduction

According to the Dual-Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986), visual and verbal information are processed in distinct channels. In view of this, it has been widely agreed by educators that teaching or learning materials containing both verbal and visual modes of information should improve learning. Based on various cognitive theories, Mayer and colleagues proposed the theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2001, 2005; Mayer & Sims, 1994) which guides multimedia instructional design. The number of studies regarding multimedia learning has grown significantly in recent years. However, since most studies dealing with multimedia learning are conducted in experimental settings, there still exists uncertainty about how learners process multimedia information in real classrooms. To probe in-depth into how students learn concepts in the science classroom with multimedia materials, we conducted a study that examined students' visual attention in terms of their eye-movement patterns as they were given a multimedia presentation using the Microsoft PowerPoint software in the classroom. The following two issues were explored in the study: (1) In a real classroom, how would university students distribute their visual attention to a multimedia presentation with different text–picture formats? (2) How do learners with different backgrounds differ in their processing of multimedia material?

Section snippets

Theory of multimedia learning

The theory of multimedia learning proposed by Mayer and colleagues (Mayer, 2001; Mayer & Sims, 1994) was constructed based on cognitive theories such as the dual code theory (Paivio, 1986) and the cognition-load theory (Plass, Moreno, & Brunken, 2010; Sweller, 1988). The dual code theory argues that human cognition has two distinct but interconnected systems that process different modes of information (i.e., visual and non-visual modes) in different channels. Studies supporting the dual system

Subjects

Twenty-one university students in various science departments, including earth sciences, physics, chemistry and biology, in a national university in Taiwan were voluntarily involved in the study. These students were either in the sophomore or junior years. Among the participants, ten who were majoring in earth sciences were labeled as the ES students, while the other 11 were assigned to the “non-earth-science” (NES) group. It should be noted that the department of Earth Sciences in the

Results

To avoid long explanations of each eye movement measure, the findings of the study are organized in response to the research questions, focusing on how the various slides as well as the text/picture zones of the multimedia presentation are viewed and inspected. A discussion of the role of prior knowledge then follows.

Summary and discussion

In this study, we used the eye tracker to record and analyze learners' visual attention distributions over a multimedia (PPT) presentation in a real classroom where an instructor gave a lecture on the topic of dinosaurs. Our study showed that during the presentation, the students allocated much of their attention to both the PPT presentation and to the instructor. When viewing the PPT slides, visual attention increased for those slides containing both text and picture components, compared to

Educational implications

Based on the results of this study, some educational implications can be drawn. First, when presenting multimedia material in the real classroom, a written text or note about course content is necessary for enhancing learners' visual attention. Second, although longer average fixation durations were expected to be found for pictures (Rayner, Smith, Malcolm, & Henderson, 2009), our data shows that the percentage of text reading time was high on slides with the conceptual graphics. This finding

Research limitations and suggestions for future studies

It is necessary to note that since the study was conducted in an authentic classroom environment, and the eye-movement data were collected from one student at a time, there might be some dynamic factors that could reduce the power of the interpretations and inferences we made from the data, even though we made efforts to ensure that the students received the same quality of instruction. These factors may include the varying pace of narration delivered by the instructor, the variety of

Acknowledgments

Funding of this research work was supported by National Science Council (NSC), Taiwan, under Grant numbers: NSC 100-2511-S-003-039-MY3, NSC 100-2511-S-003-040-MY3. The authors also wish to thank the Aim for the Top University (ATU) project of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) funded by the Ministry of Education and NSC under contact NSC 100-2631-S-003-006.

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