The Effectiveness of an Online Knowledge Map Instructional Presentation
Open Access
- Author:
- Foor, Jamie Lee
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 16, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Bonnie J Meyer, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Bonnie J Meyer, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Melissa Hardy, Committee Member
Jonna Marie Kulikowich, Committee Member
Rayne Audrey Sperling, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Knowledge Maps
Instructional Strategies
Undergraduate Students
Library Instruction - Abstract:
- In this study, I investigated the effectiveness of the knowledge map (k-map) instructional strategy compared to a text-based presentation in an online environment. K-maps consist of node-link representations of concepts that together form the content of a topic or domain. The benefits of using k-maps are that concepts and ideas are represented as nodes so the learner does not have as much text to process. Cognitive load was hypothesized to be reduced in the k-map condition because relationships among concepts and ideas are explicitly labeled by links; thereby freeing learners from the need to infer relationships. The k-map and text-based presentations used in this study represented the library research process. Two versions of the k-map and text presentations were created. One version included images that served as examples of concepts or ideas. The other version included descriptions of the examples rather than pictures. I hypothesized that participants receiving the k-map instruction would outperform participants receiving the text-based version on measures of recall, transfer, and cognitive load. The images were included to investigate the effect they would have in an already graphical k-map condition versus the less graphical text condition. Participants included 208 lower division undergraduates from two universities. The sampling was designed to ensure that a wide range of reading skill was represented. I also investigated the reading skill level of the participants and how reading skill interacted with the type of instruction (k-map vs. text-based). Contrary to predictions, the results indicated that participants did not benefit from the k-map presentation over the text condition in terms of total recall of ideas and recall of main ideas. Additionally, there were no main effects for condition on the transfer test; however, a significant interaction between condition and reading skills indicated that some participants performed better in the text condition with images presentation than other conditions. Cognitive load measures indicated that the condition with traditional text and images was more efficient than receiving a k-map version in terms of transfer for participants with medium levels of reading skills. Further analysis indicated that despite this reduction in cognitive load, learners’ level of schema development for the topic was not significantly different. The results of this study indicated that knowledge maps did not provide advantages over traditional text-based presentational methods in an online environment for learning about library research processes. Cognitive load measures indicated that the complexity of the k-map might have been too difficult for learners to process in the short instructional presentation. More research is needed to determine what design variables may help to alleviate this complexity in the application of k-map instruction to online learning for undergraduates.