Assessing learning styles through eye tracking for e-learning applications

Adapting the presentation of learning material to the specific student’s characteristics is useful to improve the overall learning experience and learning styles can play an important role to this purpose. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to distinguish between Visual and Verbal learning styles from gaze data. In an experiment involving first year students of an engineering faculty, content regarding the basics of programming was presented in both text and graphic form, and participants’ gaze data was recorded by means of an eye tracker. Three metrics were selected to characterize the user’s gaze behavior, namely, percentage of fixation duration, percentage of fixations, and average fixation duration. Percentages were calculated on ten intervals into which each participant’s interaction time was subdivided, and this allowed us to perform timebased assessments. The obtained results showed a significant relation between gaze data and Visual/Verbal learning styles for an information arrangement where the same concept is presented in graphical format on the left and in text format on the right. We think that this study can provide a useful contribution to learning styles research carried out exploiting eye tracking technology, as it is characterized by unique traits that cannot be found in similar investigations.