Mental Models & Instructional Planning

Abstract

Important educational implications have been drawn mainly from two movements in epistemology: constructivism and situated cognition. Whereas constructivism is relevant for instruction primarily on a meta-theoretical level, the concept of situated cognition has strong educational implications for instructional practice. A central assumption of situated cognition is that people construct mental models to meet the requirements of (learning) situations to be cognitively mastered. Research on how to influence the construction of mental models has been criticized by several authors from a theoretical and methodological perspective. This chapter asks: Has descriptive research on mental models in instructional contexts provided results that can serve as a foundation for prescriptions to facilitate or improve the student’s construction of mental models? We first discuss the characteristics of learning situations that necessitate the construction of mental models. Our next step is a search for theoretically sound conceptions of instruction that either impel students to construct mental models for themselves or which adaptively guide and direct the students in the process of model construction. We report on an exploratory study which investigated: (a) the applicability of cognitive apprenticeship for designing effective learning environments; (b) the effect of providing an initial conceptual model on learner construction of mental models during instruction; and, (c) the long-term effectiveness of a multimedia learning program on acquired domain-specific knowledge and the stability of initially constructed mental models. Finally, we address what happens when there are no relevant learner preconceptions available.