EPET Brown Bag Series (11/12/18) | K. Bret Staudt Willet - Bigger Is Not Always Better: Revisiting How and Why Educators Use Twitter #Edchat | Dr. Yi-Ling Cheng - Categorical or Dimensional Models for Hierarchical Structure of Cognitive Process

Post date: Nov 12, 2018 4:37:40 PM

Bigger Is Not Always Better: Revisiting How and Why Educators Use Twitter #Edchat

K. Bret Staudt Willet

In this talk, I describe my practicum project, defended in August 2018. I describe the evolving scope of the project, my methods, my findings, and some related projects that are still in the works. Much recent research has highlighted a variety of uses of Twitter related to educators’ professional development; here, I conducted a mixed methods study revisits Carpenter and Krutka’s (2014) survey of how and whyeducators use Twitter, narrowing the scope to a single hashtag, #Edchat. From October, 1, 2017 to June 5, 2018, I collected 1.2 million unique #Edchat tweets from about 200,000 different tweeters. Through machine coding I describe how educators contributed to #Edchat, and through human-coded content analysis I describe why. I found that #Edchat offered educators a content source, a place to grow their reputation, and opportunities to connect with other educators for mutually beneficial purposes. Although the typical contributor retweeted just a single time in eight months, this busy conversation has persisted for a decade—however, the volume of content in #Edchat can be overwhelming for novices. In future work, I look at the nature of participation in Twitter #Edchat and how the actions of a few contributors can greatly affect the experience of everyone else. I am also developing a machine learning model for classifying the purposes of tweets with this hashtag, with an eye toward building a tool that would steer pre-service teachers to an appropriate hashtag conversation based on their subject area and experience with Twitter.

EPET Brown Bag Series 11/12/18 | Willet - Bigger Is Not Always Better: Revisiting How and Why Educators Use Twitter #Edchat from John Bell on Vimeo.

Categorical or Dimensional Models for Hierarchical Structure of Cognitive Process

Yi-Ling Cheng

Modeling cognitive processes in learning has always been of interest for researchers. While previous studies have demonstrated that the structure of cognitive process is hierarchical, the choice of modeling cognitive processes varies between studies. The choice maybe for a person-oriented approach or a variable-oriented approach. The possibility that learning progression plays a role here, however, is less considered. It also worth noting that different learning theories could inform the placement of attributes in the cognitive structures. The current study aimed to answer these questions with a simulation study and a real data application. To do so, two levels of learning progressions (high and low) with hierarchical structures were simulated with 9 and 21 items respectively from categorical or dimensional models. TIMSS 2011 data was used for the real data application.