Studying Conceptual Change in Classrooms Using Association Rule Mining to Detect Changes in Students' Explanations of the Effects of Urban Planning and Social Policy

TY - JOUR

T1 - Studying Conceptual Change in Classrooms Using Association Rule Mining to Detect Changes in Students' Explanations of the Effects of Urban Planning and Social Policy

AU - Hjorth, Arthur

AU - Wilensky, Uri

PY - 2019/7

Y1 - 2019/7

N2 - Context . Conceptual developments in our understanding of knowledge are merging with machine-learning methods for making sense of data. This creates new, and interesting ways in which we can document and analyse knowledge, and conceptual change. Problem . Currently, the study of conceptual change is often limited to small sample sizes because of the laborious nature of existing, purely qualitative approaches. Method . We present Association Rule Mining to better measure and understand changes in students' thinking at the classroom level, based on data collected while implementing a constructionist learning activity in a US college classroom. Association Rule Mining is used on a set of qualitatively coded student responses. We then look at changes in the association rules between students' responses before and after a learning activity to better understand students'conceptual change at the classroom level. Results . We find that students converge on a more complete and accurate set of causal claims in their post-responses. Finding these changes would have been difficult or impossible without Association Rule Mining, or a similar approach. This suggests that Association Rule Mining is a potentially fruitful approach to analysing conceptual change at the classroom level. Constructivist content . Association Rule Mining is agnostic with regard to the ontology of its data. This makes Association Rule Mining a particularly suitable analysis method when taking a constructivist view of learning

AB - Context . Conceptual developments in our understanding of knowledge are merging with machine-learning methods for making sense of data. This creates new, and interesting ways in which we can document and analyse knowledge, and conceptual change. Problem . Currently, the study of conceptual change is often limited to small sample sizes because of the laborious nature of existing, purely qualitative approaches. Method . We present Association Rule Mining to better measure and understand changes in students' thinking at the classroom level, based on data collected while implementing a constructionist learning activity in a US college classroom. Association Rule Mining is used on a set of qualitatively coded student responses. We then look at changes in the association rules between students' responses before and after a learning activity to better understand students'conceptual change at the classroom level. Results . We find that students converge on a more complete and accurate set of causal claims in their post-responses. Finding these changes would have been difficult or impossible without Association Rule Mining, or a similar approach. This suggests that Association Rule Mining is a potentially fruitful approach to analysing conceptual change at the classroom level. Constructivist content . Association Rule Mining is agnostic with regard to the ontology of its data. This makes Association Rule Mining a particularly suitable analysis method when taking a constructivist view of learning

KW - Qualitative research

KW - computational methods

KW - knowledge analysis

KW - education

KW - conceptual change

KW - complex systems thinking

KW - learning sciences

KW - constructionism

KW - LEARNING ANALYTICS

KW - SIMCITY

KW - GAMES

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1782-348X

VL - 14

SP - 272

EP - 283

JO - Constructivist Foundations

JF - Constructivist Foundations

IS - 3

ER -