Visualising and examining sequential actions as behavioural paths that can be interpreted as markers of complex behaviours

Abstract

Visualisation of pathways taken by students through problem solving environments provides the potential to identify patterns of exploratory behaviour that may relate to different levels of proficiency or different cognitive approaches. This is particularly the case when problems are situated in complex online environments and are programmed to generate large scale data for analysis. Using process data from an online collaborative problem solving task, we visualised behavioural paths of 607 pairs of students as directed graphs. The empirical paths were then examined using exploratory network analysis based on four main aspects of exploration (prominence, branches, clusters, and shortest paths..