An Examination of Eye Movements, Reading Skills and the Impact of Seductive Details on Students’ Learning

• Author / Creator

  Turgeon, Krystle-Lee

• This dissertation consists of three separate studies. The purpose of the first study was to examine whether junior high students’ eye movement patterns are sensitive to differences in reading skills and/or general developmental changes as well as whether junior high students’ eye movement patterns are related to text comprehension. Forty junior high students completed a variety of reading tasks, one with an eye-tracker. Results revealed that age and sight word reading were not associated with eye movement measures. Phonemic decoding efficiency was a marginally significant predictor of the number of saccades, and passage comprehension predicted first and gaze fixation durations as well as saccade amplitudes. Percentage of regression and first fixation durations were both predictors of text comprehension. In sum, the first study provided general information about the eye movements of young adolescent readers while reading a complex text.
  The purpose of the second study was to examine how seductive details in scientific text impact (a) online processing of text, (b) emotional and cognitive interests, and (c) learning outcomes of junior high school students. Eye movements of 58 junior high students were monitored while they read a scientific text (with or without seductive sentences and/or with informative or seductive images), adapted from Lehman et al. (2007) and Harp and Mayer (1997). The students’ cognitive and emotional interests were assessed separately for each screen. After the participants finished reading the text, they answered recall and comprehension questions to measure their learning. Overall, results showed that the presence of different types of seductive information has different impact on how much the participants remember and comprehend the important information. In general, the added seductive sentences and images did not affect students’ cognitive or emotional situational interest; however, seductive sentences were attended to and those exposed to screens containing seductive text gave higher cognitive interest ratings for these screens. Results also indicated that the additional information significantly increased student processing time and that students processed base sentences faster when only base information was presented. Little time was spent examining the images and no differences were found between informative and seductive images. These findings suggest that including irrelevant additional information, either as text or pictures, may not have the desired effect of improving students’ interest, and could be detrimental by increasing information processing time.
  The purpose of the third study was to expand on the second study by including two additional conditions and assessing older students. Undergraduate students read on a computer a scientific text with or without seductive details. The participants’ eye movements were tracked and their cognitive and emotional interest was assessed separately for each screen. Immediately after reading the text, participants answered recall and comprehension questions. Results showed that enhancing factual text with seductive information did not improve learning outcomes, but it did increase the text processing time. Neither the additional seductive sentences, seductive images, nor informative images affected the students’ emotional or cognitive interest. Similar to the second study, these findings suggest that adding seductive details, whether in the form of additional text or as images, may not have the desired effect of improving interest, and may be harmful for learning by increasing the time needed to process the text.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • eye movement
  • reading
  • seductive details

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-axzv-py69

• License

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