Using eye-tracking to measure cognitive engagement with feedback in a digital literacy game

This study investigates the provision of two types of auditory elaborative automated digital feedback (metalinguistic and informational) in the context of a digital game for reading skills development in English as a foreign language. Nineteen 11-year-old Spanish-Catalan school children played through two digital minigames while their eye-movements were tracked. When they made an error, they received either metalinguistic or informational feedback. Analysing the gaze data from the eye-tracker alongside game log data about errors allowed us to compare how participants engaged cognitively with the two types of feedback. No differences were found in terms of which feedback type was better at helping students recover from their errors, however data showed that the two feedback types were processed differently. Evidence was found to suggest that those participants who listened to the informational feedback were able to utilise it more directly to recover from errors.