Tracking Students’ Eye-Movements when Reading Learning Objects on Mobile Phones: A Discourse Analysis of Luganda Language Teacher-Trainees’ Reflective Observations

Abstract

Although eye-tracking technologies such as Tobii-T120/TX and Eye-Tribe are steadily becoming ubiquitous, and while their appropriation in education can aid teachers to collect robust information on how students move their eyes when reading and engaging with different learning objects, many teachers of Luganda language are yet to gain experiences of utilizing these technologies in their teaching. This paper emerges from a semester-long (17 weeks) study which followed a Design Based Research (DBR) approach and deployed qualitative techniques to cultivate the experiences of 68 Luganda language teacher-trainees in utilizing different emerging Educational Technologies (ETs) in their teaching. The study was guided by Kolb (1984)’s Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) and Reeves (2006)’s model of conducting research in authentic e-learning contexts. During the study, trainees concretely experienced, abstractly conceptualized and made observational reflections about their own active experimentations of different ETs in teaching Luganda language. In this paper, we describe how we supported the trainees to conduct an active experimentation of Tobii-T120 to track how students moved their eyes when reading and engaging with learning objects on an emulated smart phone. Following the observational reflections, which the trainees made about their active experimentation, this paper also presents a discourse analysis thereof.

Keywords

• Reading
• Emerging Technologies
• Eye-Trackers
• Experiential Learning
• Active Experimentation
• Learning Artifacts