Matt Eliot

Eye Tracking and the Learning System: An Overview

In everyday and learning tasks, the eyes have, firstly, the roles of locating and recognizing objects and then, secondly, directing the actions to make use of them (Land & Tatler 2009). The use of eye tracking can reveal important aspects about students’ learning processes. Because eye tracking provides insights into the allocation of visual attention, it is very suited to study differences in learners’ attentional processes. In this section of the book, the contributions focus on the visual processes that occur when participants are performing a task.

Developing a conceptual model for the effective assessment of individual student learning in team-based subjects *

Assessment of student learning in team-based subjects can be challenging, as the inherent complexity in this learning environment can create ambiguity for academic staff and students alike. This five-institution research project gathered data from academic staff and students about their experiences with assessment in team-based settings, data which served as a support for the development of a conceptual model for effective assessment of individual student learning in this highly collaborative setting. This paper reports on the research design of this on-going project, the conceptual assessment model, and the future directions for the project itself.

A tool for supporting Web-based empirical research: providing a basis for Web design guidelines

Current Web design guidelines are often based on little more than intuition or anecdotal evidence. When research is cited to support Web design guidelines, that research has frequently been conducted as part of a small usability study or a print-media study. Whether such sources can be validly generalized into standard Web design guidelines is questionable but the practice is widespread. Professional technical communicators may be interested in conducting experiments to determine what Web design elements most benefit their audiences, paying attention to how those users interact with their own computers at a place and time of their own choosing. Conducting such research, however, requires a level of technical expertise usually reserved for programmers. To address this problem, our research team has been developing a tool to aid non-programmers in conducting Web-based experiments of Web design features. The ultimate goal of such experiments would be the development of research-based Web design guidelines.

The Development and Refinement of Student Self-Regulatory Strategies in Online Learning Environments

This paper reports on the initial stages of a doctoral research project investigating how higher education students develop and refine self-regulatory and cognitive learning strategies in the e-learning context. Studying in an e-learning platform requires the use and refinement of self-regulatory strategies that include activating prior knowledge, goal setting, as well as monitoring and regulating learning. A growing number of studies (Greene and Azevedo, 2010; Van Gog and Scheiter, 2010; Hadwin, Oshige, Gress, & Winne, 2010) have explored aspects of students’ cognitive strategies, self-regulation and metacognitive learning strategies in the e-learning and or hypermedia contexts. This longitudinal research project considers students’ e-learning strategies in varied e-learning environments across different sequenced courses. In this project, participants are asked to perform a simple learning task of their own choosing, a task performed in front of a computer augmented with an eye tracking system. Participants are then debriefed on their experience of the task, stimulated by watching their own eye movements. This paper will report the overall design of the research project, some considerations which informed this design, and present preliminary results from the initial period of data collection.