2015/12/30 by Onofrio Rosario Battaglia, Battaglia, Onofrio Rosario, Benedetto Di Paola +3
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Mathematics · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Multi-Criteria Decision Making #Physics Education (physics.ed-ph) #Sensory Analysis and Statistical Methods #Statistical Methods and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1512.08998
openalex publication_date 2015/12/30 · openalex created_date 2022/09/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the last years many studies examined the consistency of students' answers\nin a variety of contexts. Some of these papers tried to develop more detailed\nmodels of the consistency of students' reasoning, or to subdivide a sample of\nstudents into intellectually similar subgroups. The problem of taking a set of\ndata and separating it into subgroups where the elements of each subgroup are\nmore similar to each other than they are to elements not in the subgroup has\nbeen extensively studied through the methods of Cluster Analysis. This method\ncan separate students into groups that can be recognized and characterized by\ncommon traits in their answers, without any prior knowledge of what form those\ngroups would take (unbiased classification). In this paper we start from a\ndetailed analysis of the data coding needed in Cluster Analysis, in order to\ndiscuss the meaning and the limits of the interpretation of quantitative\nresults. Then two methods commonly used in Cluster Analysis are described and\nthe variables and parameters involved are outlined and criticized. Section III\ndeals with the application of these methods to the analysis of data from an\nopen-ended questionnaire administered to a sample of university students, and\nthe quantitative results are discussed. Finally, the quantitative results are\nrelated to student answers and compared with previous results reported in the\nliterature, by pointing out the new insights resulting from the application of\nsuch new methods.\n