Adapting the online reasoning chain construction task format to investigate student reasoning trajectories

Dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR) are increasingly being used as a framework for investigating and understanding student reasoning in physics. In particular, they help account for why students who successfully demonstrate the requisite knowledge and skills (collectively referred to as mindware) on one physics task may not apply the same knowledge and skills on an analogous task containing a salient distracting feature (SDF). In this framework, a provisional model is always generated by process 1 (recognition), but process 2 (analysis) may or may not be engaged and may or may not scrutinize that provisional model. The dynamics of process 1 and process 2 suggest that a variety of different reasoning trajectories are possible when a student responds to a physics question. In this investigation, we have adapted the online reasoning chain construction assessment (ORCCA) task format to enable students to map their thinking processes from first idea (the conscious output of process 1) to submitted answer. In this talk, we present preliminary results from this approach and compare them with the reasoning trajectory results obtained from the previously reported metacognitive prompt sequence (MPS) methodology.