Interactions of Expertise and Prior-Knowledge Activation with Low-Coherent and High-Coherent Concept Mapping Tasks

The following experiment investigated effects of lowand high-coherent prior-knowledge activation using concept maps. Thereby, we refer to and extend coherence-effects from text comprehension (McNamara & Kintsch, 1996) to priorknowledge activation. Low-coherent prior-knowledge activation was operationalized by conditions of creating-andlabeling-lines between provided concepts, high-coherent prior-knowledge activation by labeling provided lines in a concept mapping task. Subjects with two different levels of expertise (43 high-school and 45 physics university students) were randomly assigned to three conditions (1) no priorknowledge activation (2) creating-and-labeling-lines and (3) labeling-provided-lines. Results confirm a positive effect of prior-knowledge activation, a positive effect of expertise, and an interaction between expertise and the coherence of priorknowledge activation in the posttest.