1. Informatics Assessment: Techniques for Evaluating Gains in Synthetic and Analytic Abilities.
- Author
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Mitchell, Charles
- Subjects
- *
COMPUTER science , *POLITICAL science , *INTERNET , *COMPUTER assisted instruction , *COGNITION , *EDUCATION - Abstract
Informatics in the political science classroom is becoming a more influential phenomenon. Lecture presentation techniques now frequently include PowerPoint and other multimedia content. Assignments often require research and analysis be completed on Internet. The increased prevalence of IT in the classroom is producing students with informatics skills. Informatics is defined to include IT and the social and behavior implications of the technology. Acquiring informatics skills are discussed as improving students' ability to accomplish analysis and synthesis. Informatics improve students' ability to organize and discuss many phenomenon. The shared understanding they gain from informatics allows analytic routines that produce more effective and efficient student analysis. This paper presents a theoretical technique for evaluating student gains in informatics from political science education from the cognitive perspective. A baseline approach is employed to accomplish informatics assessment. First, a study is made of how informatics sophisticated people cognitize informatics issues. Second, a comparison is made between the sophisticated informatics baseline and how students cognitize informatics. Longitudinal evaluation of students is proposed to determine if students are more informatics sophisticated as a result of political science education.An e-survey conducted by the paper's author allowed theoretically establishing the baseline for informatics advanced people. The e-survey's sample was two-thirds comprised of Ph.D's. Results for a series of questions asking respondents to identify an opposing idea from a list of informatics related term were analyzed. These question resembled free association questions in psychological testing. The data produced was interpretively coded on an X axis which was a continuum between personal restrictions and personal freedoms and a Y axis that represents governmental and non-governmental values. Analysis of this coded data allowed cognitive mapping for each response word. Graphical analysis of this data is useful in perceiving semantic differentials among response words. The most frequently mentioned response phrases are presented graphically with symbols sized proportionally to how often the words are mentioned. Less frequently mentioned words are in type around the major concepts. This cognitive mapping has possibilities for mathematical analysis since X and Y coordinates are used in each coding decision. Future work could mathematically compare students gains to the informatics sophisticated sample's cognitive maps in order to evaluate classroom gains from informatics content. This paper hypothesizes that informatics content in the political science classroom would cause students' cognitive maps to increasingly resemble the cognitive maps of the informatics advanced sample. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008