Eye tracking in Educational Science: theoretical frameworks and research agendas

Abstract

Eye tracking is increasingly being used in Educational Science and so has the interest of the eye tracking community grown in this topic. In this paper we briefly introduce the discipline of Educational Science and why it might be interesting to couple it with eye tracking research. We then introduce three major research areas in Educational Science that have already successfully used eye tracking: First, eye tracking has been used to improve the instructional design of computer-based learning and testing environments, often using hyper- or multimedia. Second, eye tracking has shed light on expertise and its development in visual domains, such as chess or medicine. Third, eye tracking has recently been also used to promote visual expertise by means of eye movement modeling examples. We outline the main educational theories for these research areas and indicate where further eye tracking research is needed to expand them.