This article presents a new method of inferring students' cognitive structures and their development. A modification of Reitman and Rueter's "ordered tree technique," the method generates a structure that displays important relationships assumed to be in a student's memory about concepts taken from a specific field of study. (Author/LMO)

The results of this study are consistent with a two-stage model of learning chemistry, a multi-dimensional subject, in which students accumulate knowledge in stage one, and then restructure their knowledge in stage two. When cognitive, metacognitive and achievement variables were subjected to a predictive discriminant analysis (PDA) procedure,…