New output from my PhD work, in which we analyse self-report and trace data around a task that required students to find, evaluate, and synthesise web resources.
Many thanks to my co-authors at the OU (Bart and Karen), Maastricht (Dirk, and his team who supported the work there), and Rutgers (Chirag and Matt whose technical and design support in developing the task setup was invaluable). Author accepted version available to download [here (pdf)]1 Abstract:
Information seeking and processing are key literacy practices. However, they are activities that students, across a range of ages, struggle with. These information seeking processes can be viewed through the lens of epistemic cognition: beliefs regarding the source, justification, complexity, and certainty of knowledge. In the research reported in this article we build on established research in this area, which has typically used self-report psychometric and behavior data, and information seeking tasks involving closed-document sets. We take a novel approach in applying established self-report measures to a large-scale, naturalistic, study environment, pointing to the potential of analysis of dialogue, web-navigation – including sites visited – and other trace data, to support more traditional self-report mechanisms. Our analysis suggests that prior work demonstrating relationships between self-report indicators is not paralleled in investigation of the hypothesized relationships between self-report and trace-indicators. However, there are clear epistemic features of this trace data. The article thus demonstrates the potential of behavioral learning analytic data in understanding how epistemic cognition is brought to bear in rich information seeking and processing tasks.
Knight, S., Rienties, B., Littleton, K., Mitsui, M., Tempelaar, D. T., & Shah, C. (2017). The relationship of (perceived) epistemic cognition to interaction with resources on the internet. Computers in Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.04.014Author accepted version available to download here (pdf)