تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

DATA COLLECTION METHODS Knowledge Organization Tasks Sorting Tasks

المؤلف:  Nat Bartels

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education

الجزء والصفحة:  P15-C1

2026-08-10

10

DATA COLLECTION METHODS
Knowledge Organization Tasks

Sorting Tasks

The following data collection tools focus on knowledge organization. Generally‚ it is not difficult to set up the tasks and quantify the results. What is difficult is to designing tasks to give detailed data on the kind of knowledge you are interested in.

Sorting Tasks Sorting tasks involve giving participants a number of cards with either concepts‚ such as categories in biology (i.e. “photosynthesis”)‚ examples of the aspect of knowledge under study (i.e. examples of “Wh- questions”)‚ objects or scenes pictured on them. The participants sort the cards into groups‚ name each group and describe the differences between the groups. The participants can also be asked to try to combine their groups into bigger groups or to subdivide each group into smaller groups. There are many variations to this type of task. In their study of chess expertise‚ Freyhof‚ Gruber & Ziegler (1992) had participants circle groupings on pictures of chess games. Allard and Burnett (1985) showed participants a sketch of a basketball play‚ had the participants draw what they could remember‚ and then repeatedly showed them the play and gave them time to draw until the participant was finished. The trick here was that each time the participant had a chance to draw‚ a different color pencil was used‚ which left a clear record of what and how much was drawn in each cycle. Studies using this method have shown that experts have deeper categories for analyzing information in their domain than novices (Chi et al‚ 1981). In subjects such as basketball (Allard & Burnett‚ 1985)‚ biology (Tamir‚ 1992)‚ math (Leinhard & Smith‚ 1985) and wh-questions (Strauss et al‚ 1998) sorting tasks have shown that teachers’ knowledge is organized around the aspect of their subjects that they teach. A variation on this technique is to have participants rank the stimulus according to a specific criterion (Nathan & Koedinger‚ 2000). A downside is that the stimulus is chosen a priori and is not generated by the participants which might mean that important elements of the participants’ knowledge may be missing from the data generated by these tasks.