One key to effective conceptual change teaching is to discover each student's conceptions about the conditions before instruction. The teacher then provides experiences that create dissatisfaction with existing ideas and models a new conception that is intelligible, plausible, and fruitful. The purpose of the Acorn Project of the Chicago office of…

This paper presents preliminary hypotheses about a common core of faculty beliefs about how their students learn to solve problems in their introductory courses. Using a process of structured interviews and a concept map based analysis, we find that faculty appear to believe that students learn problem solving primarily through a process of…

Presents the text of the 1993 Ian P. Sharp Lecture on Information Science which illustrated the use of citation data from the "Science Citation Index" to obtain perspectives on Canadian science. Highlights include distribution by fields of science; highest impact and most-cited authors; and mapping science by cocitation analysis.…

A concept map is a graph in which the nodes represent concepts, the lines between the nodes represent relations, and the labels on the lines represent the nature of the relations. Concept maps have been used to assess students' knowledge structures, especially in science education. Two concept mapping techniques, constructing a map and filling in…

When students use concept maps to construct and represent their understandings, these concept maps can be analyzed for representation of understanding from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. In this study, a qualitative approach was utilized to extend the interpretations from the quantitative analysis of students' conceptual…

This paper reports a study on how prospective elementary school teachers make sense of teaching social studies through conceptual mapping, and therefore provide an opportunity for teacher educators to assess the value of conceptual mapping as a pedagogical tool. Pre- and post-course concept mapping was incorporated into three sections of an…

This paper presents a mixed-method evaluation design which utilizes concept mapping along with questionnaire and interviews. Recent developments in mixed-method evaluation have helped identify five purposes which mixed-method evaluation designs tend to serve. These are triangulation, complementarity, development, initiation, and expansion. The…

Research on notetaking as a learning strategy and on the related techniques of outlining and concept mapping is reviewed. The effectiveness of these techniques in helping the learner encode new information and their usefulness in interactive multimedia instruction are explored. Research strongly supports an external-storage function of notetaking…

The generalizability of scores from different scales in performance assessment was studied. First, a concept map of teachers' and raters' perceptions about various scores and scales was constructed using multidimensional scaling analysis. Then, a generalizability study using a random, partially nested design was conducted to analyze the…

In a best-evidence synthesis of studies that examine change in teacher candidates' conceptions and practices during their teacher education course work, too few researchers provide evidence for the linkage between candidates' beliefs and their learning. To address this problem, a mixed-design study explored on the micro-level (i.e., a lesson) the…

An alternative method of measuring the knowledge of students is to use mental models, and specifically concept maps. Concept maps provide a visual representation of conceptual and relationship knowledge within a particular domain. This study builds on previous studies and attempts to reduce their methodological weaknesses. Students in several…

With the establishment of the Internet and World Wide Web as part of the digital revolution, there has been a trend in which synchronous and asynchronous distance education opportunities have been made available to a greater variety of learners. However, students are indiscriminately pursuing online learning opportunities for the sake of…

This paper presents a slide presentation software that incorporates a concept map, which explicitly shows how the various slides (and other multimedia components) presented are related to each other. Furthermore, presentations are conceived as hypermedia systems, where the presenter can navigate among slides (and the concept map) instead of the…

This study was designed to explore the validity of scores from a select-and-fill-in (SAFI) concept map assessment as a measure of 130 undergraduate students' connected understanding of introductory astronomy. Scores from SAFI maps created for this purpose possessed high internal consistency and showed large mean increases from the beginning to the…

This paper uses a theoretical framework for concept mapping as an instance of a learning environment - the knowledge arena - and examines it against an existing framework for active learning called REAL (Rich Environment for Active Learning). The paper is intended to help in the understanding of environments for learning. Section 1 defines a…