It is urgent that we re-examine models of knowledge and knowledge-making within the university, at this time of open learning and deregulated multi-million dollar and euro open science hubs and portals. For otherwise, we are bound into "crude" instrumentalism, "delivering" "knowledge packets" rather than seeing our…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of node-link mapping on students' meaningful learning and conceptual change in a 1-semester introductory life-science course. This study used node-link mapping to integrate and apply the National Research Council's (NRC, 2005) three principles of human learning: engaging students' prior…

Reports that learners' alternative ideas in science may be coherent, stable, and theory-like. Studies how a learner can simultaneously hold several alternative explanatory schemes, each of which is persistent over time and applied coherently across a wide range of overlapping contexts. Concludes that the manifold nature of learners' conceptions…

Describes the case of a woman who experienced disparity in mathematics classrooms between learning (which for her was necessarily relational) and its validation by a system that did not ratify meaningful learning but instead rewarded the behavioral products of rote or instrumental learning. (MKR)

Examines the mathematical proof schemes of students starting their studies at the University of Cordoba and relates these schemes to the meanings of mathematical proof in different institutional contexts. Concludes that deductive mathematical proof is difficult for these students. Suggests that the different institutional meanings of proof might…

Proposes an account of mechanisms by which students develop knowledge structures for modeling the physical world with algebra. (Author/CCM)

In an effort to examine the impact of the changes being made at San Jose State University (California) in the calculus curriculum, multiple measures were collected and analyzed. This study focuses on the relationship between performance on a pretest and the class grade. Through written responses on the pretest, a belief and knowledge profile for…

Ten individuals in the Educational Technology Program at the University of Northern Colorado served as subjects for this study, which was designed to: (1) identify cognitive networks of concepts within components of a system design model for expert and novice instructional developers, and (2) determine cognitive networks of concepts between…

This study was concerned with assessing knowledge of concept interrelationships. Comparisons were made between performance on the concept comparison task (making a comparative judgment in the form of a rating on each pair of a set of concept labels) and essay test performance. (Author/PN)

Explores the successive and progressive changes in the structural complexity and propositional validity of knowledge held by students enrolled in an advanced undergraduate university-level biology course. Finds that in general, a significant amount of weak restructuring occurs and that the most radical type of strong restructuring occurs during…

Concepts of body parts and their relationships were assessed in children ages three, four, and five, as well as in adults. Three specific questions were addressed: (1) What do children understand about such "partonomic" relations? (2) Is there an order in the acquisition of partonomic concepts? and (3) Do children exhibit any confusions in their…

Because knowledge is constantly in flux, it is important for individuals to accurately incorporate new information into previously developed knowledge structures. Some of the issues surrounding this development of thought are explored in this paper. Although the phenomenon of knowledge integration is relatively common, very little empirical…

New methods for representing the structural properties of domain-specific knowledge were studied. Network representations of data from 40 college students' ratings of the relatedness of domain concepts were derived using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm, and similarity between students' and instructor's networks was then assessed using a…

Uses a video presentation of six situations relating to the evaporation and boiling of liquids and the escape of dissolved gases from solution and investigates graduate scientists' understanding of the concepts of boiling and evaporation. (Author/YDS)

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…