Star Wars: A developmental study of expert and novice knowledge structures

Abstract

Using the domain of “Star Wars”, expert and novice groups were delineated within each of six grade levels: 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, and college. A hierarchical structure of “Star Wars” containing high-level goals, subgoals, and basic actions was constructed. A probe procedure determined whether a subject could successively identify a basic action and its related subgoals and high-level goals. In addition, subjects identified the antagonists' goals and story theme. All analyses yielded significant effects of knowledge and of age, a significant interaction occurring only once. Analyses indicated that older experts' story representations were qualitatively different from those of younger experts, the former being based upon a political-ethical-military “international conflict” schema, the latter upon a military-based “good guy-bad guy” schema. Older novices, also employing an “international conflict” schema, were poor in relating actions to the schema. Younger novices performed poorly, showing little evidence of schema utilization. It was concluded that (a) age-related representational differences were due primarily to the differential prior knowledge of schema, and (b) expert-novice differences of older individuals were due to differential ability to utilize thematic and major goal knowledge to interpret actions, while for younger individuals expert-novice differences were due to the expert's superior ability to interpret specific story actions in relation to the “good guy-bad guy” schema.