More ideas for my 610 research proposal which is DUE next Monday!

Concepts to consider:
•Relational links: semantic vs. structural (my study looks at structural)
•Revisit associations: general vs. specific
•Types of knowledge: declarative vs. ____
•Types of memory: recall vs. recognition (my study looks at recall)

New literature to incorporate:
•Concept maps are node-link diagrams that depict concepts and relationships within a knowledge domain (Andrews 2008, 520) - within a knowledge domain
•Knowledge network representation technique (Dhindsa 2010) – better than saying metacognitive tool (metacognitive tool too vague unless I define)
•Network of nodes and links that accurately and meaningfully represent relations between these nodes (Pinto 2010)
•Knowledge a structured entity (Brookes 1980, 254)
•Little research has focused on establishing existing knowledge and measuring how it changes through using information (Kari 2007) – could pre- and post- CM be used to illustrate this change?
From Herl article: construct validation of an approach to modeling cognitive structure of US history knowledge (Herl, Baker and Niemi)
•Two memory theories: hierarchical (Ausubel) and associationist (Deese)
•Concept mapping as learning strategies (instructional tools)
•Nice wording: “growing consensus among researchers”
•Hierarchical: “part of” and “example of”
•Hierarchical vs. associationist concept maps
•Idea of relational links
•Scoring systems for concept mapping provide quantitative assessments
•Research in cognitive structure identifies patterns in subject domain matter of experts
•Experts structures: cohesive, tightly integrated
•Novices structures: superficial relationships
•Define declarative knowledge: factual, describable information whose organization is flexible (West 1986)
•Herl’s study used experts’ concept maps as criteria to score students’ concept maps
•Herl’s study measured students’ content knowledge and looked at the semantic relationships between concepts; my study looks at structural components
•My study asks: CAN pre and post concept maps illustrate knowledge change?
•Nice wording: “This task was designed to…”
•Nice wording: “adapted from previous research”
•To score the organizational structure of the concept maps, Herl used the C measure (C measures the degree of similarity between neighborhoods of terms in maps)
•They did two types of analyses: descriptive statistics and significance tests
•The number of terms and links were countable statistics
•They used a pre-defined list of terms (selected by experts)
•They used a pre-defined list of links (determined from prior research), such as prior to, led to, response to, similar to, part of, used for