Predicting Student Performance Based on Eye Gaze During Collaborative Problem Solving

Abstract

Eye-gaze activity provides rich information about individuals’ engagement in social interactions. Gaze is one of the strongest visual cues in face-to-face interaction. Previous studies have examined how eye gaze can be used to coordinate social interactions such as turn taking and identifying the focus of attention. In this study, we investigate the role of gaze during collaborative problem-solving tasks, specifically how individuals perform different gazing activities when holding different team roles in pair programming, and also whether the differences in eye gaze (if any) provide predictive insight into learning outcomes. We analyzed 40 students’ eye-gaze activities, which were annotated for each second during a collaborative problem-solving task (~50 min on average). The results show that students’ roles in the collaborative task have a significant relationship with eye-gaze activities. Moreover, participants’ gaze activities can provide predictive insight into their post-test scores. These findings suggest that simple activity measures such as relative frequency of eye-gaze activities can be very useful in understanding the collaborative process.