Prácticas educativas europeas segregadoras

This study is unique in that rather than comparing eye-tracking measures between participant groups (e.g. high and low skilled readers) or measuring eye-tracking in relation to specific lexical and syntactic features, this study compares eye-tracking metrics between difference reading tasks and task performance. Two implications for testing can be discerned from the above results. First, the differences between tasks in the types of reading elicited indicates that a variety of reading comprehension tasks at various levels of cognitive

educators, it is worth reinforcing the importance of goal-setting strategies as part of successful reading. Since efficient reading was associated with score in the discrete tasks, but global reading was associated with score in the open-ended summary task, developing readers should develop awareness of reading purpose and tailor their reading speed to the demands of reading purpose.

There are several limitations in the current study. First, the eye-tracking measures used in this study are quite coarse. Fixations per word and average fixation duration, for example, are very general measurements based on a participant’s entire reading trial worth of data. The areas of interest in this study were coarsely defined to understand whether readers were paying attention to the text or to the task in the reading trials. However, a more principled selection of areas of interest may also provide illustration of reading behavior across different reading settings. There is plenty of room to investigate more finer grained eye-tracking metrics at specific paragraph, sentence, and word levels. There was also no examination of how the eye- tracking metrics varied within participants over the time course of trials. Since rereading measurements were not statistically distinct from total number of fixations per word in this study’s data, examining rereading by examining eye-movements at different times throughout trials may provide better insight to the conscious strategies of readers, such as when and where to reread text. Finally, no linguistic features were highlighted as areas of interest, and the current study took a rather content-agnostic approach to eye-movements in the hopes that task conditions rather than topic information and linguistic features could be witnessed as motivating reading behavior. However, development of areas of interest based on a comparison of task response areas to related text information could provide further insight into how eye-movements relate to accessing and processing specific information from text.

Next, some eye-tracking metrics used in this study are a matter of individual differences and general literacy, so it may be difficult to make a claim that the reading task elicited a certain behavior or that a skilled reader consciously activated use of behavior for the task. It is difficult to make claims about whether shorter fixations lead to better reading scores, although it was predictive in each model, as it is not clear whether being a skilled reading causes one to make shorter fixations, or making shorter fixations helps one develop into a skilled reader.

Understanding this would require further investigation. However, the idea that the eye-tracking metrics are mere individual difference factors is mitigated by the within individual comparison of the between tasks analyses. For the task comparisons, eye-tracking metrics were compared based on how they differed within a single reader across tasks, so the difference between fixation duration between tasks retains interpretability.

Finally, previous research warns against claiming that any eye-tracking measure is direct evidence of certain underlying processes (Cook & Wei, 2019). To address this, findings were discussed in terms of the intersection between eye-tracking features which related to tasks and performance. The conglomeration of metrics associated with each task allow for some inference of underlying process, but the connection between metrics and cognition, such as fixation duration and careful attention, should be taken with a grain of salt.

In addition to the adjustments and additions to eye-tracking metrics mentioned above, there are several avenues for further research. Previous research has looked at how eye-tracking can be used to understand processes in answering shorter open-ended response comprehension questions (Bax, 2013). The current study examined eye-movement behavior in MC tasks, cloze tasks, and summary tasks, but clearly there is a larger gap in openness and productivity between the summary task and the MC and cloze tasks. A task with more open-endedness than the cloze

task, but not as productive as the summary task, may have provided more insight into how tasks elicit reading behavior, and comparing short answer tasks with the other tasks should be

investigated in future research.

The productive nature of the summaries are of particular interest for future research. Linguistic features of reader production can be analyzed using natural language processing methods and potentially compared to eye-tracking data to explore the relationships between attention and language production, perhaps providing insight into the processes of developing mental models. Additionally, qualitative examination of visual data from eye-tracking was only briefly utilized in this study, but there is room to explore further the visual data from heat maps and scan paths as they allow us to witness real-time strategy use. Future studies can examine the appearance of reading strategies in visual data.

Last, motivated by the importance of intrinsic motivation in the summary score, it is important to understand how individual readers’ motivation may affect their eye-movement behavior during reading. Reader perceptions, as gathered by stimulated recall, interview, or survey, may provide further cues to aspects of readers which impact the way they approach texts. Further studies should include self-reported data from participants regarding perceptions of topic familiarity, task ease, and test authenticity which can be compared to the actual real-time reading behavior of readers.

7 CONCLUSIONS

This chapter presents a general discussion of this dissertation. It includes a summary of the research carried out, a synthesis of the findings for each research question in this dissertation, further connections to previous research, and more in-depth recommendations for language testing and education.