The Eye-Teach-Stats consortium came together one final time in Heidelberg on 11-12 June 2026 to reflect on nearly three years of collaboration and discuss the project’s final deliverables. Looking back on the journey — from our first online kick-off meeting in 2023 to this final gathering — it was inspiring to see how a shared research idea had evolved into a complete teacher education programme built around eye-tracking research.

Project partners gathered in Freiburg on 11–12 December 2025 to review progress across all work packages and prepare the project’s final outputs. Discussions focused on data collection and analysis, case studies, the teaching modules, the Course Concept Manual, and the project website. As the project entered its final stage, the meeting provided an opportunity to coordinate the remaining work before the final dissemination of the project outcomes.

A major milestone was reached as testing officially began across the partner countries. Pre-service teachers and  in-service teachers started working with the eye-tracking vignettes and completing the accompanying assessments.

During our face-to-face meeting in Utrecht on 10–11 April 2025, project partners brought together the different components developed throughout the project. We explored the learning environment hosted on MAMPF, reviewed feedback from the expert evaluation, and further refined the accompanying Content Knowledge (CK) and Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) assessments. This meeting marked an important transition from development to implementation, ensuring that the project’s learning environment and assessment strategy were ready for the next phase.

With the eye-tracking vignettes reaching maturity, we began organising them into graph-specific teaching modules, each bringing together several vignettes that address different systematic student errors within a single statistical graph type. Alongside this, work also started on the Course Concept Manual, which will provide teacher educators with practical guidance for implementing the materials in different educational contexts.

As the vignette collection continued to grow, our focus shifted towards creating the project’s online learning environment. During this period, we developed the project website, integrated the learning materials into the MAMPF platform, and prepared the vignettes for expert review. By the end of 2024, all four graph types had been integrated into the digital environment, laying the foundation for making the Eye-Teach-Stats resources accessible to teacher educators and researchers across Europe.

During the spring and summer of 2024, we worked in parallel on all four statistical graph types — histograms, case-value plots, dotplots, and boxplots — refining the eye-tracking vignettes towards their final version. Building on authentic student responses, eye-tracking recordings, and earlier rounds of development, we improved the structure, explanations, graph visualisations, and learning activities to ensure consistency across all four graph types. By August 2024, the eye-tracking vignettes had reached their final version, marking a major milestone as the project moved significantly closer to delivering a complete collection of eye-tracking vignettes.

During our face-to-face meeting in Leuven on 7–9 April 2024, project partners built on the findings of our systematic literature review and established the foundations of the Eye-Teach-Stats course. One of the key outcomes of the meeting was distinguishing between observable student errors and their underlying conceptual difficulties. We also adopted the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2018) as the instructional framework for developing our eye-tracking vignettes. These decisions continue to guide the educational design of the project.

During our third project meeting, held online on February 2, we shared and discussed our very first vignette prototypes. These short learning modules combine real student responses with eye-tracking video, offering teachers a powerful window into how students approach graph interpretation tasks. It’s exciting to see our materials moving from research to practice—we can’t wait to test and refine them further!

Our first in-person meeting took place at Heidelberg University of Education, where partner teams presented key research on how students (mis)interpret statistical graphs. We explored how these common difficulties could be made visible through eye-tracking videos, and how this technology might help teachers gain new insights into student thinking. It was inspiring to meet in person and see our shared ideas begin to take shape!