Effects of teacher students’ study progress on their gaze behavior while solving of an economics knowledge test

Positive effects of study progress on the economic knowledge of bachelor students are evident and were often referred to as proof of the validity of tests in the context of a longitudinal analysis. However, differences between domain-specific (e.g., semester) or discipline-specific (e.g., attended courses) indicators of study progress on students’ solving the economics tasks are relevant for both diagnostic and instructional purposes, but have hardly been researched to date. In an eye tracking study, we therefore calculated the average fixation duration during 900 task-solving processes of 35 economics teacher students solving 25 single-choice economics tasks. A multi-level mediation analysis shows that both indicators (i.e., semester and attended courses) were positively correlated with economics knowledge. At the same time, the impact of semesters and courses attended on their test performance was partially mediated by average fixation duration on the attractor and distractors, respectively. This suggests that visual attention differs during the task-solving process depending on the domain- or discipline-specific indicator of study progress.