This work establishes novel approaches to measuring language diversity within short texts that can be used to examine differences in student language and possible associations with categorical data.ġ. Using the ordination graphs, we were able to observe patterns in the CR corpus that further supported our predictions for the data set. Additionally, ordination provided meaningful visual representations of the corpus by reducing complex word frequency matrices to two-dimensional graphs. Other ecological measures, including Shannon’s and Simpson’s diversity, measure the diversity of language within a single CR. We found that the ecological diversity metrics that compare CRs to each other (Whittaker’s beta, species turnover, and Bray–Curtis Dissimilarity) were informative and correlated well with our predicted differences among categories and other text analysis methods. Using previous work, we were able to predict that we would observe the most difference based on Thinking, then Timing and did not expect differences based on Type allowing us to test the utility of these methods for categorical examination of the corpus. The CRs were collected at two time points (Timing), from three types of higher-ed institutions (Type), and across three levels of student understanding (Thinking). Herein, we examined the utility of ecological diversity measures and ordination techniques to quantify differences in short texts by applying these methods in parallel to traditional text analysis methods to a corpus of previously studied college student CRs.
Constructed responses (CRs) are a common form of assessment but are difficult to evaluate using traditional methods of lexical diversity due to text length restrictions. We novelly applied established ecology methods to quantify and compare language diversity within a corpus of short written student texts. 3Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States.2Department of Biological Sciences, California State University Stanislaus, One University Circle, Turlock, CA, United States.1CREATE for STEM Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States.
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