The effect of structured stepwise presentations on students’ fraction learning: an eye-tracking study

The structured stepwise presentation is based on the segmenting and cueing principles. The main purpose of the study was to examine the effect of the structured stepwise presentations on students’ attention and fraction learning. A total of 100 primary pupils participated in this study. They were divided into three parallel groups and were, respectively, applied three kinds of presentation types (structured and stepwise, no structure and stepwise, and structure and no stepwise) of the teaching content to learn the fraction concept. A stable eye tracker was used to record students’ visual attention during learning, the first fixation duration and total fixation duration of students were recorded, and the regression time was also calculated within correspondent relative elements. After the experiment, through a one-way ANOVA test, we found significant differences among the three groups in students’ attention. The learning performance of these three groups also differed. The results showed that structured stepwise presentation played an important role in attention guidance during fraction teaching. It better guided students’ attention to connecting relative elements and resulted in better learning performance in fraction learning. The findings suggested the importance of structured stepwise presentations during teaching practices.