Students’ Construction of Structured Knowledge Representations

Abstract

While acquiring and communicating knowledge, students are also engaged in processes related to the organization and representation of information. However, representational skills and processes are not explicitly taught, and the process by which students learn and apply these skills is an issue still in need of systematic study. This article describes an exploratory study on the acquisition and use of knowledge representation skills and structures by sixth graders, supported by a computer-based learning environment. The results indicate that these symbolic structures can be taught successfully, and that students using them in the context of instructional tasks perform at the higher band of cognitive processes. The results also indicate that constructing computer knowledge bases affected the students’ abilities to analyze, organize, and represent knowledge and that the students were able to create representations of considerable structural complexity and varied nature (e.g., taxonomic, encyclopedic, and classification trees) and content. As a corollary, a series of issues that deserve a deeper and systematic inquiry are presented (e.g., the repertoire of symbol structures or schemas that are better candidates for teaching should be defined; the learning and application processes of these intellectual tools should be traced; and the refinement process of these schemas once acquired and repeatedly used should be studied, along with their cognitive robustness).

Keywords:

• cognitive skills
• communication
• computer-assisted instruction
• knowledge acquisition