Cognitive Task Analysis and Think-Aloud Interviews

We drafted about 30 introductory-level statistical inference problems, ranging from calculating the maximum likelihood estimator to finding the marginal distribution when given the joint distribution. We conducted think-aloud interviews with students in Carnegie Mellon’s introductory statistical inference course in spring 2019. We are currently working on transcribing these interviews so we can compare the steps students took to solve our problems to the cognitive tasks we predicted students would undertake to solve problems. This work is joint with Josue Orellana and Dr. Alex Reinhart.