TY - JOUR
T1 - Students’ construction of structured knowledge representations
AU - Mioduser, David
AU - María Marin, Marta Santa
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank the children who participated in this study, the sixth graders from the Juan Rafael Meofio Hidalgo School of Alajuela, Costa Rica, for their willingness and their valuable effort, as well as the class and computer teachers for their involvement in this project. The K-Tree project was implemented as part of the Educational Computing Program, a nationwide program carried out in Costa Rica by the Omar Dengo Foundation.
PY - 1995
Y1 - 1995
N2 - 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).
AB - 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).
KW - Cognitive skills
KW - Communication
KW - Computer-assisted instruction
KW - Knowledge acquisition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0011555861&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/08886504.1995.10782152
DO - 10.1080/08886504.1995.10782152
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AN - SCOPUS:0011555861
SN - 0888-6504
VL - 28
SP - 63
EP - 84
JO - Journal of Research on Computing in Education
JF - Journal of Research on Computing in Education
IS - 1
ER -