The effect of curriculum organization on the acquisition of abstract declarative knowledge in computer-based instructions

Abstract

The United States of America has dropped behind many countries in terms of the Science and Engineering university degrees awarded since the beginning of the nineties. Multiple studies have been conducted to determine the cause of this decline in degrees awarded in order to reverse the trend in US education. The goal of these studies was to determine the proper instructional methods that facilitate the knowledge acquisition process for the student. It has been determined that no one method works for all types of curriculum, for example, methods that have been found to work effectively in curriculum that teaches procedures and physical systems often fail in curriculum that teaches abstract and conceptual content. The purpose of this study is to design an instructional method that facilitates the teaching of abstract knowledge in the Industrial Engineering curriculum, and to demonstrate its effectiveness through empirical research. An experiment including 72 undergraduate students was conducted to determine the best method of acquiring abstract knowledge. All students were presented with the same abstract knowledge but presented in different types of organization. These organization types consisted of a bottom-up moving from specific to general information, a top-down moving from general to more specific information, and Unorganized random presentation of topics. Another factor that was also introduced is graphing, which is a method that is believe to improve the learning process. The experiment was completed in 8 weeks and data were gathered and analyzed. The results strongly suggest that abstract knowledge acquisition, as it relates to Industrial Engineering concepts, is greatly improved when the knowledge is presented in a bottom-up hierarchical fashion. On the other hand, neither graphing nor the top-down or unorganized conditions affect learning in these novice students. The understanding of what facilitate learning is very critical to how best to deliver content to students, especially in today’s digital world. For example, in an online learning environment, an intelligent tutoring software can be used to automatically load different organizational structure of the same content based on the student response to the instruction. The same software can load different organizations of the content to personalize the learning to different students, meaning that if a student has demonstrated a learning behavior that suggests his content needs to be presented in a bottom-up fashion, while another student may demonstrate a different behavior, which would suggest his content to be presented in top-down fashion. Therefore, the curriculum can be created once but presented in different hierarchies to meet the students’ needs.