Students’ Construction of Structured Knowledge Representations

Students, while acquiring as well as communicating knowledge, are regularly 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 paper 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 successfully taught, and that students using them in the context of instructional tasks perform at the higher band of cognitive processes; that constructing computer knowledge bases affected the students’ abilities to analyze, organize and represent knowledge; 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 which deserve a deeper and systematic inquiry are presented (e.g., the repertoire of symbol structures or schemas which are better candidates for teaching should be defined; the learning and application process 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”). STUDENTS’ CONSTRUCTION OF STRUCTURED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATIONS Students, while acquiring as well as communicating knowledge, are regularly engaged in processes related to the organization and representation of information. Almost all tasks students face during their schooling require using some kind of organizational structure (e.g., charts, tables, text-composition templates) while manipulating information items from varied sources (e.g., textbooks, newspapers, teachers, the student’s own knowledge-base), for that information to be used in solving problems, answering exam items, preparing surveys and reports, or delivering presentations. Moreover, it has been suggested that “in formal thinking, the structure is the message” (Ohlsson, 1993, p. 62), and that approaching unfamiliar knowledge or generating new knowledge are propitiated by the use of the kind of symbol structures referred to in the literature as representational structures (Mioduser, 1990), thought-forms (Keegan, 1989), epistemic forms (Collins & Ferguson, 1993) or abstract schemas (Ohlsson, 1993). However, at least in two main aspects these theoretical formulations have yet to find their way into the educational practice. First, representational skills and processes are not explicitly taught, following the assumption that somehow they will develop as a by-product of schooling. Second, the process by which students learn and apply these skills is an issue still in need of systematic study (Mioduser, 1990; Ohlsson, 1993). This paper describes an exploratory study on the acquisition and use of knowledge representation skills by sixth graders, supported by a computer-based learning environment called “The Knowledgeable Tree” or “K-Tree”. In the coming sections we present a review of related research, a description of the learning environment and its rationale, and the study design, results and conclusions.