BEGIN:VCALENDAR
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:PlanIt Purple
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//PlanIt Purple//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
STATUS:CONFIRMED
LAST-MODIFIED:20090424T115506
URL:http://www.northwestern.edu/nico/events/index.html#seminars
PRIORITY:0
CLASS:PUBLIC
UID:381560@northwestern.edu
SUMMARY:Wednesdays@NICO: Applying Computational Methods to the Study of Commonsense Science Knowledge
DESCRIPTION:Bruce Sherin\, Education & Social Policy Over the last three decades\, researchers in science education have devoted substantial effort to the study of commonsense science knowledge\, the informally-gained knowledge of the natural world that students possess prior to formal instruction in a scientific discipline. Research in this tradition has\, to date\, generally relied on hand-coding of interview data. In this talk\, I will discuss our attempts to automate the coding of data; beginning with data in the form of raw interview transcripts\, I will show how it is possible both to induce coding categories and code the transcripts\, all without supervision from a human coder. Given the tacit assumptions that are built into the field’s theories and methods\, this result is quite surprising. In this work\, we make use of a data corpus consisting of clinical interviews in which middle school students were asked to explain the seasons. The computational techniques I will describe are principally based on a combination of Latent Semantic Analysis and Cluster Analysis\, and build on initial work\, using the same corpus\, by Gregory Dam and Stefan Kaufmann (Dam & Kaufmann\, 2008). NICO Coffee Hour will follow for questions\, networking and collaboration. http://www.northwestern.edu/nico/events/index.html#seminars
DTSTART:20090429T120000
DTEND:20090429T140000
CREATED:20090130T000000
DTSTAMP:20090130T000000
SEQUENCE:0
LOCATION:Evanston
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END:VCALENDAR