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Main Principle: How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know

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Main Principle: How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know

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Knowledge can be organized in ways that either do or do not facilitate learning, performance, and retention.

As instructors, we should consider the tasks students will be asked to perform in a given course or discipline in order to identify what knowledge organizations would best support those tasks.

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Showing students ways to organize knowledge and privately comparing it to your own organizational structure

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Experts have diverse knowledge structures in order to connect new topics to those old structures.

Novices tend to create separate knowledge structures and not connect new and old ideas, and need to learn how to connect these ideas to create a diverse structure to add to.

As novices are behind experts in terms of knowledge organization, experts can sometimes forget how to help encourage those organizations to develop.

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Are experts limited to one knowledge structure?

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Are experts limited to one knowledge structure?

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Consider a paleontologist's knowledge of dinosaurs organized on:

A timeline of geological age

A category of eating habitats

A relationship to modern-day reptiles

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Highlights organization features

Makes connections among concepts explicit

This is when you ask for two opposite cases/information to help highlight multiple content points and shape the branching off of information for the students knowledge organization.

Example: Using ocean animals, differentiating based on reproductive capabilities, breathing, diet instead of just focusing on similarities of environment helps create a more expert knowledge organization.

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Course Subject: Anatomy and Physiology

Course Structure:

The course is organized on the major systems of the body and requires students to identify and describe the location and function of the major organs, bones, muscles, and tissues in the body.

Students are also asked to explain the relationships among parts or higher-order principles that cut across systems.

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Anand's Knowledge Organization:

With a lot of work, my students learn to identify most of the parts of the human body and can describe the role of each part in its body system.

On the last exam I asked them to identify and describe all the structures involved in the regulation of blood pressure, and most of the students were unable to answer the question correctly.

Students' Knowledge Organization:

They can identify and describe all the parts, but when it comes to how those parts fit together, students have a difficult time.

They may have organized their knowledge according to the major body systems and discrete parts of the body rather than the relationships of the functions of different parts of the body.

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... Challenge their own knowledge organizations.

... Work with multiple organization structures while learning.

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Which student has learned more about the topic?

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Which student has learned more about the topic?

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Question: When did the British defeat the Spanish Armada?

Student 1: The battle happened in 1588.

The student knows this from memorizing the isolated fact.

Student 2: The battle happened around 1590.

The student knows the British colonized Virginia just after 1600, and the British wouldn't dare organize a massive overseas voyage until navigation was considered safe. If it takes about 10 years to organize maritime traffic, then the battle could happen around 1590.

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What knowledge structure does each student represent?

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What knowledge structure does each student represent?

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Course Subject: Art History

Course Structure:

I begin with an introductory description of key terms and concepts, including a discussion of the basic visual elements (line, color, light, form, composition, space).

In the remaining course, I show slides of important works, progressing chronologically.

I identify important features that characterize each piece and point out relationships among various movements, schools, and periods.

I ask students to identify the title of the work, the artist, the school, and the period in which it was produced.

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Rachel's Knowledge Organization:

I know there are a lot of individual pieces, but they naturally cluster by period, school, and technique.

Students' Knowledge Organization:

They may have latched onto chronology as the prominent organizational principle and used a timeline.

Timelines make a great number of isolating facts, but do not allow for relationships between different art pieces.

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Knowledge organization supports the tasks being performed

"Form Fits Function"

Form - The role that knowledge plays in someone's life

Fit - The nature of someone's knowledge

Function - Experience changes how people organize their knowledge

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... Reflect on potential knowledge organizations students are likely to naturally develop.

... Give more tasks guided to restructure knowledge organizations best suited for various courses/disciplines.

... Draw on their own and new knowledge organizations to explore other methods students might prefer.

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Providing students with the organizational structure of the course

Sharing the organization of each lecture, lab, or discussion

Example: adding an agenda before each class on the board to walk through the flow of content and connecting new topics to old lectures to explicitly connect them.

Thorough syllabus with notes on what topics are grouped together

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A - A simple knowledge structure. Each segment can be seen as a separate class or topic. The learner does not draw connections between the topics. It is harder to retain knowledge. (Novice)

B - Connections are arranged in the form of a chain of associations. Can lead to difficulties if one link in the chain is broken, or if some deviation from the specified sequence is required. The more nodes linked in such a simple chain, the slower and more difficult it is on average to traverse from one piece of knowledge to another. (Novice)

C - Knowledge is comprised of a hierarchy of information. Pieces of information fit within a complex structure, having categories and other rules. (Expert)

D - A highly connected knowledge structure with additional links that indicate cross-referencing or suggest where strict hierarchies might break down.

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Interconnected, hierarchical connections are more useful and easier to retrieve from multiple cues

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Deep connections, and multiple organization structures allows for more flexible use and advanced problem solving