Eye Movement Research On Junior Middle School Students' PISA Scientific Problem Solving

Students' ability to solve scientific problems is an important embodiment of their scientific literacy.Eye-tracking technique was used to explore the PISA scientific problem solving of junior high school students can not only obtain the results on the behavioral level,but also reflect the cognitive processing and problem solving strategies in the process.Therefore,eye movement research can provide a new perspective to explore the scientific problem solving of junior high school students in PISA more objectively and accurately on the basis of traditional research.Behavior results: There were significant differences in the overall scores of PISA science problem solving among students of different levels.High-level students were significantly higher than middle and lower level students,and middle level students are significantly higher than lower level students.But no gender difference was found in the total score.Students at the higher levels spent significantly more time solving problems than students at the intermediate level.Eye-tracking results: In the description area,the number of fixation,fixation duration,and average fixation duration of the correct problem solver were significantly higher than the incorrect problem solver.In the chart area,fixation duration,the number of fixation,the number of regression,the first fixation duration,average fixation duration,and percentage of total fixation duration of the correct problem solver were significantly higher than the incorrect problem solver.Among the three areas of the problem,the fixation counts of incorrect problem solvers in the background region was significantly higher than that in the chart region,but there was no significant difference in the fixation duration and percentage of total fixation duration between the two regions.In addition,eye-tracking results showed gender differences.In the background and description area,the number of fixation,fixation duration,average fixation duration and percentage of total fixation duration of female students were significantly higher than that of male students.The behavior results showed that in the PISA science problem solving without time limitation,the more time spent on a task,the better scientific performance tends to be.There was a positive correlation between scientific achievement and scientific problem solving ability.The eye-tracking results suggested that correct and incorrect problem solvers have different cognitive processes in the process of PISA scientific problem solving.Correct problem solvers pay more attention to the description and diagram information of the problem.Moreover,they are often able to review the key information of the diagram multiple times.In addition,the mental representations they created in the diagram area of the problem contained more useful information and were of higher quality.On the other hand,incorrect problem solvers paid more attention to the background information.They also focused on problem description information,but lacked interaction and integration between description and diagram information.The eye movement results also reflected the cognitive style differences between male and female students in solving PISA scientific problems.Female students were better at processing text information and were able to quickly create mental representations based on background information.In addition,more attention was paid to the background and descriptive information,and more inclined to interpret charts with text information.Male students had average mental representations in each area.They only retrieved the effective information closely related to the graph in the context and description information.They paid more attention and cognitive processing in the graph area,and were more inclined to interpret the text with the graph information.This study combined the behavioral and eye movement indicators to study the cognitive differences of students in solving PISA scientific problems under different behavioral performance and gender.The results of this study are not only of great significance for the in-depth understanding of the cognitive process of scientific problem solving of junior high school students in PISA,but also of great practical significance for promoting the development of the scientific problem solving ability of junior high school students in practical science teaching.