Measuring Expert-like Schema

As new knowledge is acquired it is assimilated into an organized network called a schema. With instruction and practice a student’s schema can become more expert-like. Currently, no measure is available to educators who wish to create exact models of their students’ schema. As a result, many educators use multiple choice or open-ended questions, or concept maps to model a student’s schema. However, these methods provide no information to the researcher of how the connections between topics arose or are subjective in nature. As a first step towards providing a better assessment, researchers have created a more objective way to measure a person’s schema using similarity ratings.  During this graduate seminar I will go over how people measure schema and its applications to introductory physics and the broader STEM field.