An Integrated Approach to Characterizing Changes in Organic Chemistry Students’ Eye Movements

Although the use of representations is crucial for problem-solving in chemistry, students often encounter challenges when using them. Hence, various interventions have been designed to support students’ use of chemistry representations, which can motivate students to modify their visual behavior. However, to fully understand how these interventions affect students, it is crucial not only to understand how they are using representations but also to understand how and to what extent their visual behavior changes in response to these interventions. Since learning may induce complex changes in eye movement across spatial, temporal, and psychophysiological dimensions, a key methodological challenge is how to comprehensively characterize these changes in instructional settings. However, relying on single metrics offers only fragmented insights, capturing isolated aspects of students’ information processing, whereas simultaneous interpretation of multiple eye-tracking metrics presents considerable challenges. In light of this, we conducted two studies using stereochemistry tasks to explore how changes in eye movements can be comprehensively characterized in students who participated in an intervention and those who did not. By calculating the average absolute bounded normalized change across multiple eye-tracking metrics, as ΔGaze, and additionally examining the change of individual eye-tracking metrics across tasks, we were able to characterize both overall and detailed changes in students’ eye movements while considering the multifaceted nature of eye-tracking data. In this article, we illustrate the potential and limitations of this methodological approach.