What are you reading most: Attention in eLearning

Abstract

Eye tracking is useful for investigating how people read and the attention that they give to certain items. We investigated how much participants read parts of educational text when they are required to answer questions relating to it. We found that there is no difference between the normalized number of fixations observed when participants answered multiple-choice questions correctly compared to when they answered incorrectly, however, there are differences for fill-in-the-blanks questions. Different presentation formats of the text and questions have an effect on the how thoroughly paragraphs containing answers to questions are read. For formats where only text is presented the first or last paragraphs are read the most thoroughly. For formats where the questions are shown with text, the fill-in-the-blanks questions were read more thoroughly than other parts on the page. This can be used to influence how students learn material in eLearning environments.