Processing Science Illustrated Texts to Understand Concepts: Evidence from Eye Movements

Most science learning in school and academic contexts is still based on successful comprehension of illustrated texts, which implies the integration of verbal and graphical information, as posited by theoretical models and documented by outcome-oriented empirical studies. Yet, little is still known about the ways in which texts and different types of visualizations, commonly introduced in science textbooks, are scanned when they are being read and observed to learn concepts from them. For a better understanding of the reasons behind a poor learning performance from reading a science text with illustrations, a process approach is needed. This presentation will focus on studies that indicate how and why science text and graphics processing can be examined by means of eye-tracking methodology, which has rarely been adopted in educational research. However, this methodology has recently received increased attention in studies on multimedia learning, although mainly only with university students. Data about eye-tracking investigations with primary, middle, and secondary school students will indicate that basic and finer-grained indices of visual behavior can be collected during the first and second-pass reading of an illustrated science text to understand – in an unintrusive way – the cognitive processing of different types of representation. Data will also reveal the important link between the online integrative processing, as revealed by eye movements, and the offline outcomes of scientific conceptual learning, as revealed by various measures at immediate and delayed posttests.