WS B: From Eye Movements to Instructional Design

Many students experience difficulties when interpreting statistical graphs that are not easily identifiable from written answers alone. As a result, these misinterpretations may remain unnoticed in traditional assessment formats. Eye-tracking research offers a way to complement such data sources by providing additional insight into how students visually engage with graphs while reasoning. Recent studies (Abt et al., 2025; Boels et al., 2025; Schreiter & Vogel, 2025) have shown that students’ conceptions and difficulties when interpreting statistical graphs are reflected in their gaze behaviour. By combining gaze data with students’ verbal explanations, eye-tracking vignettes make it possible to analyse how students attend to and integrate different elements of a graph when constructing an interpretation. In this way, the combination of visual and verbal data can support a more fine-grained understanding of students’ reasoning processes (Dvir & Ben-Zvi, 2023). However, such process-oriented data are rarely translated into formats that are meaningful and usable for teacher education.

The Eye Teach Stats project addresses this gap by developing eye-tracking vignettes that combine students’ answers, verbal explanations, and eye-movement data to support teachers in diagnosing students’ misinterpretations. These vignettes present authentic scenes from educational practice and offer opportunities for analysis and reflection without the pressure to act (Rutsch et al., 2018). They are designed to support the development of teachers’ diagnostic competence by focusing on how students’ systematic errors and underlying conceptual difficulties can be identified and interpreted when working with statistical graphs.

This workshop introduces teacher educators and researchers to the use of eye-tracking vignettes as a tool to support teachers in diagnosing and dealing with misinterpretations of statistical graphs (i.e., dotplots, case-value plots, histograms, and boxplots) by taking a practice-oriented approach in which participants engage directly with eye-tracking vignettes to explore students’ reasoning processes. In the workshop, participants will first be introduced to the background of eye-tracking research in statistical graphs and its relevance for understanding students’ reasoning in the context of statistical graphs.

The focus is not on technical aspects, but on how eye-movement data can be interpreted and used as a resource for professional learning. Participants will then work collaboratively with an example vignette. They will identify patterns in students’ reasoning and possible misinterpretations and discuss how these insights can inform instructional decisions. Finally, participants will connect their experiences with eye-tracking vignettes to their own contexts in teaching, teacher education, or research by reflecting on how eye-tracking vignettes can be integrated into their own practice and considering how this approach can be used across domains, such as mathematics and science, to explore students’ reasoning in different contexts. By the end of the workshop, participants will be familiar with the structure and use of eye-tracking vignettes, gain experience in analysing students’ reasoning using multiple data sources, and consider how this approach can be integrated into their own teaching, teacher education, or research contexts.