How Junior High School Students Look at the Texts and Maps in Geography Textbooks: An eye tracking study

Textbook research is usually conducted from a teacher’s point of view. Thus, little is known about how students actually read textbooks. This study analyzed how junior high school students refer to maps and sentences in a geography textbook using the eye tracking method. The participants were 32 junior high school students who took the comprehension test after reading the geography textbook of a fictional island. The textbook consisted of four paragraphs and five maps. Eye tracking analysis showed that the total fixation time of the sentence area was six times longer than that of the map area. Compared to the university students in the previous study, we found that junior high school students have a stronger tendency to adopt sentence-oriented reading. Further, this sentence-oriented tendency was more remarkable in readers with low score in the comprehension test. The readers with high scores fixated relatively longer on maps. These results suggest that junior high school students do not refer to maps which are necessary for understanding the geographical causality. We also found that the graphic-oriented reading style was related to the comprehension of the geographical causality