Card sorts are a knowledge elicitation technique in which participants are given a collection of items and are asked to partition them into groups based on their own criteria. Information about the participant's knowledge structure is inferred from the groups formed and the names used to describe the groups through various methods ranging from simple quantitative statistical measures (e.g. co-occurrence frequencies) to complex qualitative methods (e.g. content analysis on the group names). This paper introduces a new technique for analyzing card sort data that uses quantitative measures to discover rich qualitative results. This method is based upon a distance metric between sorts that allows one to measure the similarity of groupings and then look for clusters of closely related sorts across individuals. By using software for computing these clusters, it is possible to identify common concepts across individuals, despite the use of different terminology.

In contrast to the student teams used for larger and longer group projects, in-class groups are often ephemeral, lasting for only a few minutes or until the end of the period. Because of this, little effort is put into forming these groups, usually letting the students self-select their teams. This paper argues that greater student interaction and learning can take place by using instructor-selected teams. Two group formation techniques for in-class group work, the latent jigsaw method and grouping students by Felder-Silverman learning styles, are presented. Observations from a classroom deployment of these techniques are also described.

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Developing computer accommodations for users with reading disabilities involves several challenges: diversity of needs, stigma risks, and self-advocacy issues. This paper proposes a two-fold approach to address these issues. First, participatory design with reading-disabled users will inform necessary directions for technology development. Second, to help individual users identify what accommodations can benefit them, intelligent software will be developed. This software will also aid in the configuration of the accommodations.

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