Abstract:

The pedagogical theory of Constructivism asserts that an individual's knowledge is a function of his/her prior experiences, mental structures, and beliefs. However, a useful utilization of constructivism relies on the capability of the students to represent their prior knowledge. In general, information can be represented in one of two forms: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal has always been the dominant form of representation. Graph Theory, however, has inspired some researchers to configure information in graphical structures. The graphical representation of information became commonly known as Cognitive Mapping.
Teachers are finding the graphical representation very informative of their students’ misconceptions or missing concepts. In particular, the technique of Concept Mapping seems to be the most popular. Many education researchers are investigating the effect of concept mapping on students’ learning. Most of those studies aim at enhancing the learning of school subjects, such as biology, physics, math, chemistry. The constructivists are relying on cognitive mapping (especially the variety of concept mapping) for eliciting the students’ diverse backgrounds. The related experimental studies describe cognitive mapping techniques as efficient in enhancing students’ learning as well as easy to administer in classrooms.
However, part of a student's prior knowledge is a collection of personal hypotheses. It is reasonable to think that an individual’s prior knowledge and abilities would determine these hypotheses. Although a teacher should be able to answer most of his/her students' hypotheses, yet allowing the students to independently test their personal hypotheses is advantageous. A cognitive map equipped with computational capabilities would allow a group of individuals with different prior knowledge to each learn at his/her own pace while testing the causality embedded in the map. Such type of cognitive mapping supports analytical acquisition of knowledge. This argument paves the way to envisioning a relationship between the information structuring technique and the type of learning.
This paper is a proposal for an experimental study attempting to compare two cognitive mapping techniques in terms of their capacity to foster analytical knowledge acquisition among early stage learners. The comparison involves the two techniques of concept mapping and comprehensive situational mapping.

Keywords:

Knowledge management, cognitive mapping.