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We use eye-tracking as a method to examine how different mathematical representations of the same mathematical object are attended to by students. The results show that there is a meaningful difference in the eye movements between formulas and graphs. This difference can be understood in terms of the cultural and social shaping of human perception, as well as in terms of differences between the symbolic and the graphical registers, as they have been examined in literature. The results are also discussed in terms of didactic implications to support teachers in helping students to both deal with and to integrate multiple mathematical representations as well as acknowledge their own specificity.

We present a new measure for evaluating focused versus overview eye movement behavior in a stimulus divided by areas of interest. The measure can be used for overall data, as well as data over time. Using data from an ongoing project with mathematical problem solving, we describe how to calculate the measure and how to carry out a statistical evaluation of the results.

The article reports and discusses a long-term qualitative study of forty 8-10-year-old students who regularly played a math game during math lessons for 9 weeks. The goal was to explore the relations between (i) some of the pedagogical principles that underlie the game and (ii) the playing practice in terms of what actually takes place when students play the math game during regular math lessons. The article discusses indications of matches and mismatches between pedagogical principles and playing practice as they appear in analyses of observations and video recordings. The result highlights the difficulty of predicting areas in which possible mismatches appear between the intentions of the pedagogues and designers of educational technology and the actual use of the technology by the students. This also applies to educational materials that have already been pilot tested and used on a smaller scale. We emphasize the need to observe actual use for extensive periods of time, i.e. to go beyond short-time user testing.

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