Due to complex reactions and concepts, chemistry poses challenges for future scholars. Many undergraduate students struggle with chemistry, leading them to drop out or even fail the class. Understanding how students engage with different levels of representation—symbolic, submicroscopic, textual, and graphical— in chemistry can give insight into their problem-solving process. This study examines students who took or are taking General Chemistry and explores the relationship between gaze behavior and performance during chemistry problem-solving. In an interview, undergraduate students solve a series of chemistry problems while having their eye movements tracked by a complex eye-tracking algorithm. Four metrics, fixation duration, fixation count, duration of first fixation, and time to first fixation, were used to do quantitative analysis from data collected from the interview. The data were subjected to various analyses of variance, which were expected to reveal statistical differences in viewing patterns between the different levels of representation. Results were expected to show participants having higher fixation duration, fixation counts, and duration of first fixation on symbolic representations, while having shorter time to the first fixation on symbolic representations, indicating sustained focus on chemical formulas and equations during problem solving. This information will be used to improve educational equity and student retention in not only STEM but also in all fields.
