Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Computer-based educational assessments often include questions with a drag-and-drop response. Logged data obtainedfrom drag-and-drop responses allow us to go beyond scores, investigating the response strategies test-takers use to reachan answer. There is no previously published research on strategies used by test-takers in answering drag-and-drop ques-tions. We tested 476 MTurk participants under five conditions where key design features of mathematics questions weremanipulated. Regardless of the design manipulations, participants mostly used one of the two possible systematic responsestrategies. Using PRIMs cognitive architecture (Taatgen, 2013), we constructed computational cognitive models to sim-ulate the differences between these two strategies. The models were able to capture participants reaction time patterns.Our conclusion based on the models is that most participants apply a cognitively less demanding strategy by offloadingcognition on action, which is in line with the idea of strategy selection as rational metareasoning (Falk & Griffiths, 2017).