Examining Students’ Intrinsic Cognitive Load During Program Comprehension – An Eye Tracking Approach

Programming as a cognitive activity requires the utilization of various kinds of mental models that involve different cognitive loads while students learn to program. The article discusses the results of an experiment aimed at answering the following question: are eye tracking based measures related to the intrinsic cognitive load (ICL) connected with program comprehension? Thirty one students of computer science took part in the experiment. They analyzed two program codes written in the C++ language to search for (1) logical errors (LER) and (2) syntax errors (SER). ICL was measured by subjective rating of the difficulty of each task. There were significant differences found for the subjective measures of intrinsic load, the effectiveness and the time of tasks performance, and the values of eye tracking parameters: fixation duration average (FDA) and saccade amplitude average (SAA) in two experiment conditions. Longer fixation and shorter saccades were associated with higher ICL. The results obtained suggest that FDA and SAA are eye tracking measures sensitive of intrinsic cognitive load.