Students’ approaches when dealing with kinematics graphs explored by eye-tracking research method

Abstract

The paper is focused on students graphing, particularly graphing in kinematics. The main interest of the survey was in different approaches of different students group. Particularly, groups of students who performed the test the best and the worst and groups of students who answered a task correctly or incorrectly. Altogether 26 students participated in the survey from high schools and colleges. 7 tasks mostly adopted from TUGK test by Beichner (1994) were used for testing. Eye tracker research method was used and data were analysed qualitatively based on heat maps of number of fixations. We identified different numbers of fixations distributed among areas of tasks for the groups of students. Especially in most cases " Best " students did not show the same pattern like students who answered a task correctly. This indicates some general different approaches which are used by the " Best " group students. Particularly, they more frequently fixated instructions in contrast to the rest areas of the graph. They tended to judge the whole curve of a graph. Students who answered correctly or belonged to the group " Worst " tend to fixate more often the same point within the area of the task. These results suggest some hypothesis for further quantitative research.