Exploring Causality Within Collaborative Problem Solving Using Eye-Tracking

Abstract

When students are working collaboratively and communicating verbally in a technology enhanced environment, the system is not aware of what collaboration is happening outside of the technology, making it difficult to adapt the system to better support the collaboration of the students. In this paper, we analyze the causal relationships between collaborative and individual gaze measures and the influence that the students dialogue, prior knowledge, or success has on these relationships to find indicators that can be used within an adaptive system. We found that when students are discussing concrete aspects of the problem, the causal relationship between their eye gaze measures changes compared to other types of dialogue patterns. The results also show a clear difference in causal relations when the pairs with high prior knowledge or success are compared with the pairs with low prior knowledge or success. Collaborative gaze causes the individual gaze for pairs with high prior knowledge and the opposite for the pairs with low prior knowledge.