0000000000372365
AUTHOR
Saleh Mozaffari
Instruction-based clinical eye-tracking study on the visual interpretation of divergence : how do students look at vector field plots?
Relating mathematical concepts to graphical representations is a challenging task for students. In this paper, we introduce two visual strategies to qualitatively interpret the divergence of graphical vector field representations. One strategy is based on the graphical interpretation of partial derivatives, while the other is based on the flux concept. We test the effectiveness of both strategies in an instruction-based eye-tracking study with N = 41 physics majors. We found that students’ performance improved when both strategies were introduced (74% correct) instead of only one strategy (64% correct), and students performed best when they were free to choose between the two strategies (88…
Evaluating similarity measures for gaze patterns in the context of representational competence in physics education
The competent handling of representations is required for understanding physics' concepts, developing problem-solving skills, and achieving scientific expertise. Using eye-tracking methodology, we present the contributions of this paper as follows: We first investigated the preferences of students with the different levels of knowledge; experts, intermediates, and novices, in representational competence in the domain of physics problem-solving. It reveals that experts more likely prefer to use vector than other representations. Besides, a similar tendency of table representation usage was observed in all groups. Also, diagram representation has been used less than others. Secondly, we evalu…