An unsupervised quantitative method to analyse students' answering strategies to a questionnaire

Questionnaires are perhaps the most widely used instruments to assess conceptual learning in physics as well as in mathematics. In the field of physics and mathematics education research it is surely interesting to be able to use a questionnaire as a “diagnostic instrument,” i.e., to know details about relationships among student answers to the different questions. In recent years several research works focused on this goal by using different quantitative methodologies, like Factor, Model and Cluster Analyses. However, very few research works deepened the theoretical aspects of the Cluster Analysis. In this contribution, we discuss two Cluster Analysis methods with respect to this issue. By…