Use of eye tracking technique and cued retrospective reporting to explore college students’ cognitive processes during evaluating scientific explanation: Comparisons between students with high and low prior knowledge

• Main Authors: Lee, Ke-Wei, 李珂瑋
• Other Authors: Wang, Chia-Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2f8yn6

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 106 === Ability to evaluate scientific explanation is one of the main goals in science education. Attention allocation and use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies during the evaluation process may influences the outcomes of scientific explanation evaluation. However, few studies have investigated the evaluation process. This study aims at exploring whether and how prior knowledge influence processes and outcomes of scientific explanation evaluation. Learners’ attention allocation and use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies were analyzed. This study also attempts to establish the association between indices of eye movements and use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. This study took a mixed-method approach. Thirty-two undergraduates were assigned into either the high- or the low-prior knowledge group according to their score on a biology concept test. The participants’ eye movements during a task of scientific explanation evaluation were recorded. The record of eye-movements was then used as stimuli to elicit the participants’ thinking process retrospectively. Patterns of attention allocation, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, as well as their evaluation performance for the high and the low prior knowledge groups were compared. The correlations between indices of eye-movement and cognitive/metacognitive strategies were analyzed, supplemented with qualitative data, in order to understand how the evaluation process influence the evaluation performance. No significant difference was found between the high and the low prior knowledge group on their performance of scientific explanation. No difference was observed for the first-pass fixation duration. In comparisons with their counter cohorts, however, the high prior knowledge students spent longer time reading and reexamining, as well as more frequently revisiting specific areas of interests. The students in the high prior knowledge group also demonstrated more goal-directed searching while reading the context of inquiry and used more reading comprehension and inferring strategies during evaluation. The low prior knowledge students, on the other hand, used more reading comprehension strategies and more constantly monitored their reading the context of inquiryevaluation process. Findings of the correlation analyses indicated that the frequency of reading comprehension was not correlated with the first-pass fixation duration. For the evaluation process, the differences between the two groups lay in their look-back fixation duration, total fixation duration, and inter-scanning counts on specific areas of interests, as well as in the correlations between these eye-movement indices and frequencies of cognitive/metacognitive strategies at different phases of the evaluation task. For the high prior knowledge group, the aforementioned eye-movement indices were associated with frequencies of analyzing, goal-directed searching, and inferring/evaluating strategies and, therefore, may result in a higher level of understanding about inquiry and better evaluation performance. For the low prior knowledge group, the eye-movement indices were associated with the frequencies of content evaluation and conflict monitoring, which may result in a lower level of understanding about inquiry and the poor evaluation performance. Findings of the study indicated that prior knowledge influences the evaluation process in terms of attention allocation, use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, as well as the association between eye-movement behavior and strategy use. Future studies aimed to explore the process and outcomes of scientific explanation evaluation should collect these forms of process data for triangulation.