An Eye Movement Research On High School Student Solving Mechanical Problem With Or Without Physical Diagrams

A Hallmark of physics is its rich use of representations. Most introductory physics courses teach students to use these representations as they apply physical models to problem. In order to find out the functions of physical diagrams in problem-solving and the different efforts using multiple representations such as simple diagram, force diagram and physical graph, the research used one way experimental design method to investigate the eye movements of solving physical problems with or without pictures of 60 students from a high school Grade 2.Two experiments are incorporated in this paper. In experiment 1, the research studied the eye movements during solving physical problems with or without pictures. While in experiment 2, the focus is on the eye movements during solving physical problems with multiple representations such as simple diagram, force diagram and physical graph.Findings are as follows:1. For subjects of the groups with or without pictures during solving physical problems, significant differences occur among understanding score and eye movement indicators. The numbers of the indicators such as Duration and Fixation-Count of the group with pictures are lower than that of the group without pictures. However, the numbers of the indicators such as Average-Fixation-Duration and Average-Saccade- Amplitude of the group with pictures are higher than that of the group without pictures. It is unreasonable to conclude that the use of diagram representation correlate with problem-solving success.2. For subjects of the groups with different representations such as simple diagram, force diagram and physical graph, significant differences occur among understanding score and eye movement indicators such as Average-Fixation-Duration and Regression-Count, and the indicators of the group with force diagram are better than the other groups. It is unreasonable to conclude that the different representations bring out the different results during solving physical problem, and the force diagram is better to contribute the formation of physical problem representation.3. Generally speaking, through determining differences of the eye movement indicators such as IA-Average-Fixation-Duration, IA-Fixation-Count and IA-Dwell-Time in different IA, we found out significant differences occur between three groups. In Word-IA, there are significant differences between the force diagram group and simple diagram group, force diagram group and physical graph group in two indicators of eye movement. However, in Picture-IA, there are significant differences between physical graph group and simple diagram group, physical graph group and force diagram group in three indicators of eye movement; but significant differences occur in two indicators of eye movement between force diagram group and simple diagram group. It is unreasonable to conclude that the force diagram is better to contribute the comprehension of word and the physical graph is better to contribute the information extraction from picture. The findings further verify the importance of the physical diagrams in solving physical problem and the different representations bring out the different results.