Concept analysis
Descriptions of reasoning associated with each of the complexity levels are not intended as definitions. This is an important distinction between the approach taken here and those taken by developmental researchers who have described conceptual development in single domains.
We think of complexity levels as orders of hierarchical complexity and identify them by referencing structural, rather than conceptual, attributes of performances. This is because the particular conceptualizations embedded in a given performance can be explained not only by the complexity level of the performance, but by informational, contextual, and dispositional factors.
However, by rigorously separating analyses of complexity level and conceptual content, we have found clear and persistent evidence of a strong relation between conceptual content and complexity level in several knowledge domains. This relation makes it possible to describe the pathways through which individuals acquire important concepts.
Simply put, a concept analysis merges Lectical™ scores and concept codes to produce descriptions of these pathways, as shown in the figure below. To produce these, we move back and forth between the tables produced by Sequencer (which show the empirical relation between concepts and complexity levels) and the original texts, gradually building up an understanding of developmental patterns. Our general knowledge about developmental structures scaffolds this process.
The descriptions of reasoning produced with this process should not be thought of as level definitions. They are descriptions, and as such, they are subject to revision as new evidence about the conceptual content of a given thematic strand becomes available.
You can learn more about developmental maieutics from our publications, which are posted on the DTS site. We also invite you to see how we are putting our findings to work at DiscoTest.org.