What can creative data analysis using word clouds tell us about student views of learning something new?

This chapter focuses on the application of word clouds as a method of creative data analysis. Word clouds are a method of visualising textual data, where the frequency of words in the analysed text is related to their size within the visualisation or word cloud (McNaught and Lam, 2010). It is important to note that this is a collaboratively written paper, all three authors have a practitioner, teacher, background as well as research experience. However, neither our perspective nor position is singular. We would describe ourselves as relatively pragmatic, fluid, and creative in relation to research design and methods to address different research questions appropriately. Our positionality in relation to the creative data analysis using word clouds in this paper is a shared one and was reached through collaborative discussion of the data. The holistic nature of pragmatic approaches, that acknowledge and engage with complexity and practicability (Clarke and Visser, 2019) are cognisant with the complexity of the research focus (metacognition) and data in the research that will be described in this chapter.