Analyzes students' representations of fractions as they work on fraction comparison tasks and justify their solutions in a collective classroom activity. Emphasizes the importance of setting a problematic situation and encouraging students to make various representations for their learning. Suggests some implications for teacher activities and…

Presents a seven-step methodology for utilizing integrity constraint knowledge from heterogeneous databases. Describes generating a set of integrity constraints applicable at the integrated level from constraints specified on local databases. Introduces the concept of constraint-based relationships between objects in heterogeneous databases;…

Supports the use of microanalysis of conceptual change as a tool for reconceptualizing the nature of students' knowledge-in-development and dissolving concept-misconception and expert-novice dichotomies. Contains 48 references. (DDR)

Argues that the first phase of the Web is communication through shared knowledge. Predicts that the second side to the Web, yet to emerge, is that of machine-understandable information, with humans providing the inspiration and the intuition. (CR)

Introduces this special issue which describes several approaches to semantic knowledge representations. Discusses the various quantitative procedures employed in the articles, noting that they can also serve as theoretical approaches to knowledge representation. (SR)

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Discusses research dealing with the cognitive aspects of formal systems of knowledge representation. Highlights include the origins and theoretical foundations of the cognitive viewpoint; cognition and information science; cognitivism, mentalism, and subjective individualism; categorization; mental models; and sociocognitive approaches to indexing…

Reviews the history of the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of science education and surveys other selected articles with this theme. (DDR)

Compares the knowledge content of GTE (Generic Tutoring Environment), a generic instructional knowledge base that facilitates dynamic pedagogical decision making, and PEPE, a computational framework for representing pedagogical knowledge to tailor instruction to an individual student. The courseware's interaction with the student and instructional…

Seeks to identify some of the issues associated with the role of models in scientific explanations. Develops a typology of explanations and explores the notion of appropriateness in scientific explanations. Investigates the nature of models and their contribution to explanations. (DDR)

Provides a detailed, technical introduction to the state of cognitive science research, in particular the rise of the "new cognitive science," especially artificial neural net (ANN) models. Explains one influential ANN model and describes diverse applications and their implications for education. (EV)

Gaming is discussed against a background of rationalist and historicist traditions of reality; trivial and nontrivial machine models of problem solving; and rigid-rule and free-form games. (JKP)

Discusses the basic elements of a global cognitive theory for information retrieval (IR) interaction from a cognitive point of view. Within this framework are outlined the principles underlying the concept of polyrepresentation applied simultaneously to the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. Contains 95 references.…

Examines some of the basic tenets that managers and researchers alike hold dear about how people work and communicate about their work. Proposes a new model of how communication brings two types of knowledge into play in organizations and suggests that these insights may open intriguing possibilities both for managing and for organizational…