Empirical approach to interpreting card-sorting data

dc.creator	Steven F. Wolf1,2,*
dc.creator	Daniel P. Dougherty2,†
dc.creator	Gerd Kortemeyer1,2,‡
dc.date	2012-05-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:17:36Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:17:36Z
dc.identifier	1554-9178
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/c28d68e50e0f4645846a6d042794546a
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/19091
dc.description	Since it was first published 30 years ago, the seminal paper of Chi et al. on expert and novice categorization of introductory problems led to a plethora of follow-up studies within and outside of the area of physics [ Cogn. Sci. 5 121 (1981)]. These studies frequently encompass “card-sorting” exercises whereby the participants group problems. While this technique certainly allows insights into problem solving approaches, simple descriptive statistics more often than not fail to find significant differences between experts and novices. In moving beyond descriptive statistics, we describe a novel microscopic approach that takes into account the individual identity of the cards and uses graph theory and models to visualize, analyze, and interpret problem categorization experiments. We apply these methods to an introductory physics (mechanics) problem categorization experiment, and find that most of the variation in sorting outcome is not due to the sorter being an expert versus a novice, but rather due to an independent characteristic that we named “stacker” versus “spreader.” The fact that the expert-novice distinction only accounts for a smaller amount of the variation may explain the frequent null results when conducting these experiments.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	American Physical Society, APS
dc.relation	http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.010124
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/1554-9178
dc.source	Physical Review Special Topics. Physics Education Research, Vol 8, Iss 1 (2012)
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Empirical approach to interpreting card-sorting data
dc.type	article