  Employing scientific practices to obtain and use information is one of the
central facets of next generation science standards. Especially in quantum
technology education, the ability to employ such practices is an essential
skill to foster both academic success and technological development. In order
to help educators design effective instructions, the comparison between
novices' and experts' eye movements allows the identification of efficient
information extraction and integration strategies. In this work, we compare the
gaze behavior of experts and novices while solving problems in quantum physics
using an interactive simulation tool, Quantum Composer, which displays
information via multiple external representations (numerical values, equations,
graphs). During two reasoning tasks, we found that metarepresentational
competences were crucial for successful engagement with the simulation tool.
The analysis of the gaze behavior revealed that visual attention on a graph
plays a major role and redundant numerical information is ignored. Furthermore,
the total dwell time on relevant and irrelevant areas is predictive for the
score in the second task. Therefore, the results demonstrate which difficulties
novices encounter when using simulation tools and provides insights for how to
design effective instructions in quantum technology education guided by
experts' gaze behavior.
