VISUALIZING STUDENT NAVIGATION OF GEOLOGIC BLOCK DIAGRAMS

Spatial reasoning skills have been tied to student success in the geosciences. While it is known that there is a wide range of spatial abilities, how students approach spatial problems is poorly understood. The malleability of spatial skills lends them to be the focus of studies investigating the most effective way to teach these important skills, however, in order to teach these skills effectively, we need to develop a better understanding of how these skills are applied. Our research attempts to add to existing literature by employing eye-tracking as an exploratory method to investigate students’ visual navigation approaches to spatial problems, specifically geologic block diagrams. Participants were given the 16-question, multiple choice Geologic Block Cross-sectioning Test (GBCT) to initially assess their ability in recognizing cross-sections through a given geologic block. Participants were then retested 1-3 weeks later with five representative questions from an alternate version of the Geologic Block Cross-sectioning Test using an eye-tracker to record where, when and for how long participants viewed each diagram. Spatial and temporal information about participant gaze patterns was collected and analyzed using the different faces of the block diagrams as salient locations. We examine the relationship between spatial ability, as determined by the GBCT pre-test, and visual patterns while solving these problems. Consistent differences between high and low performers were observed with their view times in different locations of the diagrams. Students who performed high on the pre-test focus proportionally more time on the side face, while low pre-test performers are proportionally more focused on the top face. Both high and low performers spend little time viewing the front faces of the block diagrams. Correlations between question difficulty and pretest performance will be discussed along with implications for future research.