Concept Mapping Tasks Research Articles

Access and use of technologies in the home in the UK: implications for the curriculum

This article reports on research undertaken as part of the government initiatives to transform educational practices and raise standards through new technologies. In particular, it focuses on differences between home and school experiences of ICT use and formal/informal learning opportunities. First, the issues arising from the growing body of research‐based evidence in this field are considered. Second, a discussion of the analysis of three sources of data from the ImpaCT2 project is presented: a pupil log of ICT activity undertaken at home and at school over a period of one week (including a weekend); an internet questionnaire about home and school uses for both school work and leisure pursuits; and a concept mapping task to ascertain pupils’ understanding of computers in their world. The article concludes by considering the implications for the curriculum of home experiences of ICT and the benefits of informal learning with ICT.

Concept mapping for eliciting verified personal ontologies

Concept mapping is a valuable technique for education evaluation. This paper describes VCM, a system based on this approach: it supports teachers in creating concept-mapping tasks intended to capture the student's understanding or personal ontology of a small domain. A novel feature of our work is that the system verifies whether the student intended the map elements that will be used to infer their understanding and misconceptions. We provide a detailed description of VCM, linking it to related work and describe its qualitative evaluation.

TPL-KATS—concept map: a computerized knowledge assessment tool

A wide variety of instruments for the assessment of structural knowledge are used in psychology, education, and engineering. A software tool, TPL-KATS—Concept Map, was developed to examine the organization of mental representations via the use of a computer. This software tool provides a more efficient and user-friendly method than the traditional manual approaches to concept mapping used in the past. TPL-KATS—Concept Map can automate the entire concept map task, from instructions, to administration, to scoring. Although originally developed as a data collection tool for psychological studies, this software can be a valuable resource in training, interface design, and education as well.

Using Internet Delivered Video Cases, To Support Pre-Service Teachers' Understanding of Effective Early Literacy Instruction: An Exploratory Study.

This preliminary study explores the effects ofusing CTELL (Case Technologies EnhancingLiteracy Learning) cases on preserviceteachers' learning. Students participated inone of three instructional treatments:traditional, traditional plus video, andtraditional plus CTELL cases. A pre-postconcept web, describing students' understandingof effective reading instruction, served as themajor outcome measure. This was supplementedwith a unidimensional confidence measure,journal entries, and student interviews. Nosignificant differences were found for any ofthe three treatment conditions on the conceptmapping task or the confidence measure.However, the journal entries and interview datahighlight important issues, challenges andbenefits, with respect to the use of multimediacases. Implications for teacher education areexplored.

Probing physics students’ conceptual knowledge structures through term association

Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students’ knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the ConMap tasks) was developed to probe the interconnections within students’ store of conceptual knowledge. The tasks have students respond spontaneously to a term or problem or topic area with a sequence of associated terms; the response terms and time-of-entry data are captured. The tasks were tried on introductory physics students, and preliminary investigations show that the tasks are capable of eliciting information about the stucture of their knowledge. Specifically, data gathered through the tasks is similar to that produced by a hand-drawn concept map task, has measures that correlate with in-class exam performance, and is sensitive to learning produced by topic coverage in class. Although the results are preliminary and only suggestive, the tasks warrant further study as student-knowledge assessment instruments and sources of experimental data for cognitive modeling efforts.

The Use of Concept Mapping for Knowledge-oriented Evaluation in Nursing Education

A course in paediatric surgery, which was part of a nursing programme, was evaluated for the integration of the contents of several previously taught courses. Nineteen students participated in the study and their learning outcomes were characterised on 16 cognitive structure measures by a concept mapping task and Link Strength Matrices. It was found that students' knowledge was neither mastered nor integrated at the beginning of the course. After the course, there were minor improvements in a few of the cognitive structure measures and stability of many of the rest, students' misconceptions persisted, integration of the whole domain improved slightly, and the students tended to preserve their relative standing on the correctness of the cognitive map. The failure of the course to attain its major objectives and aims were discussed in the context of student learning in university settings and in relation to its preceding course in children's diseases. This evaluation led to the substantial revision in the c...

Collaborative learning tasks and the elaboration of conceptual knowledge

In this article we present the results of an experimental study of the influence of task characteristics on the characteristics of elaboration of conceptual knowledge in social interaction. With a pre-test and post-test we measured individual learning outcomes. We constructed a coding scheme that focuses on the communicative functions and propositional content of utterances and on elaborative episodes. The subjects were 40 students who worked in dyads on a collaborative task about electricity in one of four conditions. We compared a concept mapping task with a poster task and investigated the effect of a phase of individual preparation. The post-test scores were significantly higher than the pre-test scores. Individual preparation created better learning results and the asking of more questions. The concept mapping conditions showed more discussion of electricity concepts, collaboratively elaborated conflicts and reasoning, but no higher individual learning outcomes. In the concept mapping conditions, elaboration was related to individual learning outcomes.

The Use of Textbooks as a Tool During Collaborative Physics Learning

The study examined how features of student interaction, and the way an individual student contributes to that interaction (his or her participation), relates to the improvement of conceptual understanding within the domain of physics. The study also investigated how textbooks are used during collaborative work and how that use affects the quality of student interaction and outcomes. The participants were 56 students aged 15 or 16. The students worked in dyads on a concept-mapping task that functioned as an introduction for a new course about electricity. A condition in which the students were provided with 2 textbooks was compared with a condition without the availability of textbooks. The use of textbooks had a negative influence on the amount of elaboration and coconstruction in the student interaction. Individual learning outcomes were positively related to the amount of collaborative elaboration in the student interaction.

Differences in experienced and novice counselors' knowledge structures about clients: Implications for case conceptualization.

Concept mapping tasks (CMTs) and association tasks were used to examine knowledge structures about clients. Four experienced and 5 novice counselors read a counseling transcript, categorized client statements, and mapped the relationships among categories. Cluster analyses revealed that novice counselors (a) had more concept categories and (b) formed categories based on the temporal order of client statements. Structural features of CMTs indicated that novice counselors constructed simplistic, hierarchical representations containing few reciprocal links between categories. Experienced counselors were faster than novices at completing some of the tasks. These results support the information-processing perspective with novice counselors attending to surface detail and requiring greater time to process information, which may be indicative of their less developed schemas and skills related to structuring client information.

Student teachers explain changes in their thinking

This study described the reflections student teachers made as they compared their pre‐ and post‐student teaching responses and explained changes in those responses at the conclusion of a semester‐long student teaching field experience. Several paper‐and‐pencil tasks, including a concept map task, were administered at the beginning and end of the fourteen‐week student teaching semester. In post‐interviews, individual student teachers were asked to compare their pre‐ and post‐student teaching conceptions. Their responses indicated that intrapersonal and interpersonal sources led to changes in their thinking. Explanations for those changes were seen as method‐centric, authority‐centric, and climate‐centric. Examining the responses contributes to a growing understanding of the effects of field experience on the thinking of new teachers; it identifies the need for more reflection generated by practice during the many changes that occur in the student teaching semester.

Promoting Active Learning: The Role of System Structure in Learning From Hypertext

Since its conception, hypertext has attracted the attention of educators and psychologists alike. Although a great deal is known about learning from text, little is understood about the process of learning from hypertext or what benefit it offers over traditional text. This study is an attempt to (a) determine whether theories of learning from text may be extended to learning from hypertext, and (b) learn more about the general effectiveness of hypertext on learning. Seventy-two college undergraduates participated in a study of hypertext-based learning. Each participant was assigned to work with one of three hypertext systems. All systems contained the same documents. Two of these contained the same electronic links (pathways) between documents and the third system condition served as a control. It was presented as a digitized book (linear text) rather than as a linked system. Participants' navigation behavior was logged electronically as they worked. Posttests included an essay, a series of short-answer questions, and a concept mapping task. Analyses revealed that learning from hypertext bears many similarities to learning from text, as the predictions made by Kintsch's (1988) construction integration model were borne out. System structure systematically altered what was learned from hypertext, just as characteristics of text alter text-based learning. System structure was also relevant to the way in which learners approached the material, as navigation behavior was affected. The less structured system seems to have promoted more active processing and a deeper level of learning. In addition, hypertext was revealed to have only limited educational benefit for users in this study. Although no benefit of either hypertext system was observed over the linear system on the essay or short-answer questions, it was revealed that the presence of system links affects internal representations: Participants who were exposed to the hypertext systems produced concept maps that largely reflected their system links. Results are examined with reference to cognitive theory and the implication for system design is discussed.

Concept maps about chemical equilibrium and students' achievement scores

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between structural characteristics of students' concept maps about chemical equilibrium and independent measures of their achievement in chemistry. Fifty students in 1991 and seventy students in 1992 completed a concept-mapping task using twenty-four specified concepts. Using similarities in concept map structure, based on the presence or absence of linked pairs of concepts, non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to plot the location of the concept maps in coordinate space. The distribution of maps was based on differences in their structure, but also reflected levels of student achievement on independent tests. The relationship between the coordinate location of each student's maps and his or her test scores on independent chemistry achievement tests was sought by canonical correlation analysis of the 1991 data set. This revealed significant relationships between the MDS coordinates and test scores of recall of knowledge and its application. Multiple regression analysis of sixty-one students' maps from the 1992 data set against their percentile rank scores on a national chemistry quiz revealed significant relationships. The results are interpreted as revealing structural differences in conceptual organisation about chemical equilibrium among students with different levels of achievement and thus relative expertise in the domain. The significant relationship between map structure and cognitive process scores in chemistry also supports the view that the organisation of declarative knowledge influences its accessibility in cognitive tasks.

Construct Validation of an Approach to Modeling Cognitive Structure of U.S. History Knowledge

Abstract This research applied evolving conceptions of learning to tackle the difficult problems of how students' and experts' cognitive structures might be represented and evaluated. A diverse sample of high school students was selected to complete several tasks purporting to measure domain-specific knowledge of the Great Depression period of U.S. history, including prior knowledge, written explanation, similarity ratings, and concept mapping tasks. In this study, the technical characteristics of a method for scoring student concept maps were explored by comparing directly the quality of student maps with expert maps. Results showed that experts' concept maps could be used to score students' concept maps reliably. Further analyses showed that students who judged similarities of pairs of concepts, facts, and events from the Great Depression era in an expert-like manner constructed more correct links for those same pairs in their concept maps. MIMIC (multiple indicators, multiple causes) structural modelin...