Using the Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to analyze the cognitive activity of pedagogical students on high school physics experiments in the post-Covid-19 context

Abstract

In the post-Covid-19 pandemic context, assessing and evaluating university students’ knowledge constructions process and their cognitive interactions through direct verbal expressions have had limited. To deal with this problem, lecturers have organized discussions on different online platforms. In this article, we provide a guide to using cognitive network analysis (ENA), a novel method for quantifying, displaying, and interpreting network information based on a coded data set. To accomplish this, we considered the discourse of students from the Department of Physics at Ho Chi Minh City University of Education by discussing and researching general physics experiments online. By adapting ENA to analyze 115 discourse segments of students, the results from the visualized network diagrams reflect the cognitive nodes that students frequently manifest through online discussions. Furthermore, the Mann-Whitney non-parametric test on the network graphs also shows a significant difference in the mental interactions of the groups of students who practice in pairs and individuals.