Search results for "Qualitative data analysis"

Investigating the quality of mental models deployed by undergraduate engineering students in creating explanations: The case of thermally activated p…

2013

This paper describes a method aimed at pointing out the quality of the mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena or processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are quantitatively analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the physics education research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The use of statistical implicative analysis tools allows us to successfully identify clusters of students with respect to the similarity to the reasoning categories, defined as ``practical or everyday,'' ``descri…