Measuring students’ device specific competencies using an eye-tracking study on oscilloscopes

Abstract

At the University of Paderborn, a sophisticated Augmented Reality (AR) based application is being developed to help students acquire and deepen practical skills in dealing with electro-technical laboratory equipment. However, evaluating students’ motoric competencies while handling different laboratory devices is a challenging task. Currently, there is less work being done for an objective way to compare or evaluate students’ experimental skills. Hence, we propose an eye-tracking study in this paper with different students and laboratory engineers to identify characteristics in the scanpaths, allowing to draw conclusions from their experimental skills. Firstly, a brief introduction to the project’s context and some theoretical background are given, i.e. known characteristics of experts vs. beginners. In the next step, the task with the oscilloscope is described, which has to be solved by the group of experts (laboratory engineers) and the beginners (first semester students), who have never worked with laboratory devices before. The measured eye-tracking data is presented with respect to fixation times, areas of interest and scanpaths to identify characteristics in the measured data. It turns out that a purely quantitative analysis of the gaze data in this experiment is not very meaningful but should always be verified together with the respective solution strategy, since different solution strategies may evidently lead to similar gaze behaviors.