We describe a longitudinal study of a secondary education biology teacher at two moments in her career (1993-2002), determining the changes in her conceptions of the nature of science and its teaching and learning, and the factors that favored or hindered such changes. The changes were analyzed using cognitive maps, constructed on the basis of the…

The purpose of this study is to examine readers' comprehension as they develop their mental representation of reference in four sequential online texts. A total of 92 college students from three reading classes were recruited to complete the following steps in each text: (1) identify references, (2) draw the relationships between references, and…

The phenomenon called "aging out" includes approximately 20,000 young people who enter adulthood directly from foster care each year (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). The number of youth and young adults who aged out of care in the U.S. in 2005, the year for which the most current statistics are available, increased 48 percent…

In pragmatic philosophy, the consequences of actions determine the moral goodness and evil of the causing actions. Since the beginning of the 20th century, pragmatism has been the central philosophy in America, this includes our schools. Most of our schools are results driven. For these schools, only the data and results are important. The purpose…

Through the preferential pairing of response positions to pitch, here we show that the internal representation of pitch height is spatial in nature and affects performance, especially in musically trained participants, when response alternatives are either vertically or horizontally aligned. The finding that our cognitive system maps pitch height…

Cognitive development is driven by experience, but is mediated by domain general processes, which include learning, induction, and analogy. The concepts children understand, and the strategies they develop based on that understanding, depend on the complexity of the representation they can construct. Conceptual complexity can be defined in terms…

This essay demonstrates how the creation of cognitive maps by academics, as well as those individuals and social groups who want their "mininarratives" included in social discourses, will move social research away from modernist and positivist failings, and open a dialogue among diverse social players. Cognitive maps are visual imageries depicting…

Hypertext researchers and designers contend that the hypertext information structures may reflect the semantic structures of human memory. Further, they believe that mapping the semantic structure of an expert onto hypertext information structure and explicitly illustrating that structure in the hypertext will result in improved comprehension…

Cognitive mapping is widely used in elementary schools to create visual representation of text as an aid to learning. Mapping should be used at the secondary level also to facilitate learning of expository text or lectures. In addition to the traditional uses of mapping, it is useful for (1) providing a bridge or prelude to outlining, (2)…

Researchers have found that the elderly are as capable of learning motor skills as younger persons but perform better under some conditions than others. For example, the elderly learn and perform motor skills more efficiently when there is additional time to respond to stimulus. Tasks which are self-regulated rather than directed by an external…

In spite of being very similar, the metaphorical models of anger in English and Spanish exhibit some differences too. These have been analyzed along a number of parameters: existence of the mapping in the language, degree of conceptual elaboration, degree of linguistic conventionalization and degree of linguistic exploitation. A number of examples…

Reports a study designed to investigate the effects of gender upon the acquisition of spatial and environmental skills among primary grade children. Results showed boys performed better on complex tasks and lend support to those who argue that more extensive movements of boys through the environment leads to superior spatial ability. (Author/JDH)

This study investigated the hypothesis that disclosure of cognitive style map information raises the academic achievement of community college students. Experimental and control group mean differences were statistically significant. The size of the absolute difference in percentage points demonstrated a considerable effect on the semester grade.…

Total quality management and knowledge management are merged and used as a conceptual model to direct and develop information landscaping techniques through the coordination of information mapping, charting, querying, and reporting. Goals included: merge citation analysis and data mining, and apply data visualization and information architecture…

Discusses the field of instructional systems technology (IST) and the definition of its subject matter domain; describes cognitive mapping and semantic relatedness; and reports results of a study that generated a cognitive map to define the structure of research and theory in IST. (three references) (LRW)