ABSTRACT
When solving problems, people often use a wide array of different strategies. Effective teaching often requires isolating what strategies students are using in order to more effectively structure the instructional intervention. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a computational tool that extracts the co-occurrence of words in a corpus. Through high-dimensional matrix decomposition, LSA is able to produce a “semantic-space” allowing all experienced words, phrases, and sentences to be represented as vectors within that space. Free text responses to military scenarios were collected from officers in training as well as experienced military officers. The novice database is used as a descriptive reference, while the expert database provides the normative references. Free text responses to military scenarios were collected from officers in training as well as experienced military officers.
