Jens. Madsen, Sara U. Julio, Pawel J. Gucik, Richard Steinberg, Lucas C. Parra
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2021, Vol 118 No. 5.
Instructional videos found on YouTube has become a go-to source of information for students. These videos have viewers in the 100M+. but are we learning anything from these videos? In this study we measured students eye movements as they watched short educational videos, while we measured eye movements both using an eye tracker and webcam eye tracking. To then test whether or not students eye movements actually changed when they weren’t paying attention, we had the students watch the videos again, but this time we asked them to count backwards in decrements of 7 silently in their heads.
Here is the eye movements of 27 students as they watched these videos in the attentive and distracted conditions