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Previous research has illuminated and defined meanings and understandings that students demonstrate when reasoning about graphical images. This study used verbal and physical cues to classify students’ reasoning as either static or emergent thinking. Eye-tracking software provided further insight into precisely what students were attending to when reasoning about these graphical images. Eye-tracking results, such as eye movements, switches between depictions of relevant quantities, and total time spent on attending to attributes of the graph depicting quantities, were used to uncover patterns that emerged within groups of students that exhibited similar in-the-moment meanings and understandings. Results indicate that eye-tracking data supports previously defined verbal and physical indicators of students’ ways of reasoning, and can document a change in attention for participants whose ways of reasoning over the course of a task change. 

Previous research has illuminated and defined meanings and understandings that students demonstrate when reasoning about graphical images. This study used verbal and physical cues to classify students’ reasoning as either static or emergent thinking. Eye-tracking software provided further insight into precisely what students were attending to when reasoning about these graphical images. Eye-tracking results, such as eye movements, switches between depictions of relevant quantities, and total time spent on attending to attributes of the graph depicting quantities, were used to uncover patterns that emerged within groups of students that exhibited similar in-the-moment meanings and understandings. Results indicate that eye-tracking data supports previously defined verbal and physical indicators of students’ ways of reasoning, and can document a change in attention for participants whose ways of reasoning over the course of a task change.