Background: Analyzing student short-answer written justifications to conceptually challenging questions has proven helpful to understand student thinking and improve conceptual understanding. However, qualitative analyses are limited by the burden of analyzing large amounts of text. Purpose: We apply dense and sparse Large Language Models (LLMs)…

How data are collected and how they are analyzed is typically described in the literature, but how the data are encoded is often not described in detail. In this paper, we discuss how data typically gathered in PER are encoded and how the choice of encoding plays a role in data analysis. We describe the kinds of data that are found when using…