Students' different approaches to solving problems from kinematics in respect of good and poor performance
Abstract
The paper is focused on graphing and its difficulties in physics education. The research aim was to look closer at students' way of solving typical testing tasks in physics education; particularly, tasks included in the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics developed by Beichner (1994).
I used eye-tracking research method, which allows us to follow student's attention which they devoted to areas of presented tasks and based on it to infer their strategies when solving the problem. 23 students mostly at tertiary level of education were involved in the research. For answering the research question, approaches of students groups different in their performance of the whole.
Results based on qualitative examination of heat maps are available in Kekule, 2014. This paper is focused on the quantitative approach and comparison of fixation counts and fixation duration is provided.