Processing Raw Data both the Qualitative and Quantitative Way

Abstract

Representations and changes between them play a major role in education (e.g., HEWSON, BEETH & THORLEY 1998), problem solving (e.g., BAUER & REISER 1990), cognitive development (e.g., VOSNIADOU & BREWER 1992), processing of metaphors (e.g., INDURKHYA 1992) and the history of science (e.g., KUHN 1970). Change of representations (also called conceptual change) is amenable to both qualitative and quantitative analyses: either the degree of correspondence between some activities under study (quantitative aspect) and a hypothesized representation representation per se (qualitative aspect) can be the focus of investigations. This articles presents and discusses and knowledge tracking (KT), viz., an approach to analyze changes of representation on the basis of symbolic sequential data. KT allows the researcher to fully investigate both aspects of changes of representation. A web-site is described that provides free usage of the knowledge tracking engine (KTE), which is a tool for analyzing data according to knowledge tracking. The article concludes with a comparison between knowledge tracking and other approaches that rely on network representations of cognition. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0101111