null Modeling eye movements improves secondary students’ performance in procedural problem-solving tasks

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Modeling eye movements improves secondary students’ performance in procedural problem-solving tasks
Showing examples of how a task should be completed has always been an effective teaching strategy and now with the flood of 'How to' video tutorials on YouTube, you can find demonstrations of practically anything online. A specific field of study has developed in recent years based on the premise that the design of such recorded video demonstrations could be further improved by showing learners what the model is actually looking at when carrying out a task by displaying the model's eye movements.

Showing the model's eye movements is expected to guide learners' attention to what the model is looking at in that moment, which should make it easier to understand and learn from the demonstration and verbal explanation. Several studies have found beneficial effects of such 'eye movement modeling examples' (EMME) on attention guidance and found enhanced learning of classification tasks.

A recent study published in Learning and Instruction by leading Welten Institute researcher Halszka Jarodzka along with team members from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) found that giving students in secondary schools modeling examples that demonstrated eye movement improved their performance in procedural problem-solving tasks. Up to now, EMME has been shown to help students in other aspects, but to the best knowledge of the research team this is the first study to demonstrate that EMME can be effective to enhance learning of a procedural problem-solving task.

Read more about this research outcome.