Summary maps: Using eye tracking to investigate where students go wrong

Abstract

Worldwide, many students entering university are considered to be underprepared in terms of their academic literacy abilities. In order to support these students, the NWU offers two modules aimed at developing those academic literacy abilities that would enable students to access, process and produce academic information at tertiary level. As part of this offering, a basic Academic Literacy module focuses on summary mapping abilities, a summarising technique that is considered highly effective and valuable to students. However, despite ongoing efforts from lecturers, students continue to struggle with fully acquiring this skill to an adequate degree and therefore are not able to use this technique to its full potential. To date, very little research has been done on the process of summary mapping in general. Even fewer studies make use of eye-tracking methodologies to investigate this process even though it can offer a unique way to gain insight into the process of mapping rather than focusing on the product or the final summary map only. Chapter 2 of this study provides an account of the theoretical framework of summary mapping, how it relates to reading in the context of academic literacy, eye-movement research and finally previous studies that used eye tracking to investigate the process of information mapping. The study set out to investigate the process of summary mapping one step at a time in order to determine possible challenges for participants. The impact of comprehension, selection of relevant information and information categorisation on summary mapping was determined in order to identify the possible challenges. For the empirical part of the study participants were asked to complete a comprehension test based on a relevant text. Thereafter they were required to identify all the important information in the text and complete a summary map of a section of the provided text. During this time, their eye movements were being recorded by an eye tracker in order to record the process followed when completing a summary map. By doing so a teaching model for summary mapping could be recommended towards the improvement of the teaching of this technique that could eventually ensure that students reap the full benefit of the summary mapping technique. Statistical and qualitative comparisons indicated that participants generally had low comprehension of the text. A correlation was further identified between text comprehension and summary mapping but more specifically between vocabulary sections of the comprehension test and summary mapping as well as between participants’ selection of relevant information and summary mapping. Furthermore, it was found that participants had significant difficulty with differentiating between essential and non-essential information and could moreover not categorise such information into a logical structure. These challenges are addressed in Chapter 5 by providing a recommended teaching model for summary mapping that could be applied in academic literacy or other support modules.