Students' Processing of Differently Structured Text Materials Focused on Agricultural Waste Disposal Using Eye-tracking

Abstract

This study was focused on agricultural waste disposal (AWD) textual materials. Two educational texts are compared: designed texts traditionally with no purposeful design and structured knowledge texts, including the textual form of knowledge units. Eye-tracking technology is employed for retrieving the values of critical indicators specifying the way of reading the texts. We analysed users' visual attention and looking behaviour during the reading process. Thirty-three students worked with 45 pieces of educational texts accompanied by a didactic test. Statistical analyses show statistically significant differences neither in any indicator within studying the texts nor in the users' success rate in the didactic test. The users can work with the knowledge structured texts equivalently with the designed texts in the traditional way. The positive effect for AWD is that users can process knowledge structured texts with better results.