Eye Tracking the Feedback Assigned to Undergraduate Students in a Digital Assessment Game

High-quality feedback exerts a crucial influence on learning new skills and it is one of the most common psychological interventions. However, knowing how to deliver feedback effectively is challenging for educators in both traditional and online classroom environments. This study uses psychophysiological methodology to investigate attention allocation to different feedback valences (i.e., positive and negative feedback), as the eye tracker provides accurate information about individuals’ locus of attention when they process feedback. We collected learning analytics via a behavioral assessment game and eye-movement measures via an eye tracker to infer undergraduate students’ cognitive processing of feedback that is assigned to them after completing a task. The eye movements of n = 30 undergraduates at a university in Western Canada were tracked by the EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker while they played Posterlet, a digital game-based assessment. In Posterlet, students designed three posters and received critical (negative) or confirmatory (positive) feedback from virtual characters in the game after completing each poster. Analyses showed that, overall, students attended to critical feedback more than to confirmatory feedback, as measured by the time spent on feedback in total, per word, and per letter, and by the number of feedback fixations and revisits. However, there was no difference in dwell time between valences prior to any feedback revisits, suggesting that returning to read critical feedback more often than confirmatory feedback accounts for the overall dwell time difference between valences when feedback is assigned to students. The study summarizes the eye movement record on critical and confirmatory feedback, respectively. Implications of this research include enhancing our understanding of the differential temporal cognitive processing of feedback valences that may ultimately improve the delivery of feedback.