Modern Education And Its Background In Cognitive Psychology: Automated Question Creation And Eye Movements

In modern education, the automatic generation of test items out of texts becomes increasingly important. We have recently presented an enhanced automatic question creator (EAQC) that is able to extract the most relevant concepts out of a text and to create test items based on these concepts. Furthermore, from eye-movement research it is known that learners fixate potentially relevant information longer and more often. In the present study, we investigated whether the measurement of (individual) relevance of EAQC-concepts is related to the frequency and duration of fixations from learners when they read a text, learn it or manually extract concepts out of it. Overall, results showed a non-significant tendency that participants needed more fixations when learning the text as compared to when reading it or extracting concepts. Saccade lengths were reliably longer when participants extracted concepts than when they read them; no other differences were found. How long and how often a concept was fixated did not vary with the subjective relevance of the concept according to participant's ratings. Future research is therefore necessary to investigate a possible relationship between eye movement behavior and automated concept extraction.