Applying eye tracking to identify students' use of learning strategies in understanding program code

Eye tracking is recognized as a technological means to detect the human cognitive activity. Due to its rapid development and wide adoption among psychologists, eye-tracking technology has attracted an increasing attention from educational researchers in different academic disciplines such as language and science. There has been, however, limited eye-tracking research into learning areas that require the use of not only comprehension skills but also problem-solving strategies. Computer programming is such a learning area worthy of investigation. Therefore, this study was designed to apply eye-tracking technology to identify students' problems in understanding program code and their use of learning strategies to tackle those problems. The overall results of this study indicate that students tended to adopt different strategies to interpret different types of programming statements. Our findings can offer insights into possible ways to help students develop their knowledge and skills in computer programming. Copyright © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.