Developing a natural language processing approach for analyzing student ideas in calculus-based introductory physics

Research characterizing common student ideas about particular physics topics has significantly impacted university-level physics teaching by providing knowledge that supports instructors to target their instruction and by informing curriculum development. In this work, we utilize a Natural Language Processing algorithm (Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA) to identify distinct student ideas in a set of written responses to a conceptual physics question, with the goal of significantly expediting the process of characterizing student ideas. We preliminarily test the LDA approach by applying the algorithm to a collection of introductory physics student responses to a conceptual question about circuits, specifically attending to whether it is useful for characterizing instructionally-relevant student ideas. We find that for a large enough collection of student responses ( N ≈ 500 ), LDA can be useful for characterizing the ideas students used to answer conceptual physics questions. We discuss some considerations that researchers may take into account as they interpret the results of the LDA algorithm for characterizing student’s physics ideas.