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 modeling was used to analyze relationships among causal and indicator measures of the construct “cognitive structure.” Two concept-mapping measures (semantic content score, organizational structure score) and two writing task dimensions (content quality and argumentation) were chosen to represent indicators of the construct. The findings provided some evidence to support the theoretical position that domain-specific measures, not general achievement measures, predict performance on construct indicators