Dual Gaze as a Proxy for Collaboration in Informal Learning

Abstract

Interactive displays are increasingly employed in informal learning environments as a technology for enhancing students’ learning and engagement. Interactive displays allow students to collaborate and interact with the content in a natural and engaging manner. Despite the increased prevalence of interactive displays for learning, we know very little about how students collaborate in such settings and how this collaboration influences their performance. In this dual eye-tracking study, with 36 participants, a two-staged within-group experiment was conducted to investigate students’ collaboration and learning gains in an interactive display. The results show that collaboratively, pairs who have high gaze similarity have high learning outcomes. Individually, participants spending high proportions of time in acquiring the complementary information from images and textual parts of the learning material attain high learning outcomes. We show that the gaze is an effective proxy to cognitive mechanisms underlying collaboration not only in formal settings but also in informal learning scenarios.