Eliciting, Analyzing, and Comparing Mental Models of Complex Audio Recording Systems between Professional and Novice Recording Engineers
Open Access
- Author:
- Hill, Barry R
- Graduate Program:
- Instructional Systems
- Degree:
- Doctor of Education
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 05, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Dr Susan Land, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Dr Brian Smith, Committee Member
Peggy Noel Van Meter, Committee Member
Priya Sharma, Committee Member - Keywords:
- multidimensional scaling
card sort
mental model
expert-novice
instructional design
structural knowledge - Abstract:
- One of the goals of a pre-professional college degree program is to help students acquire the knowledge and skills relevant to a particular discipline. For this to be effective and useful upon graduation, students must be able to function in a way similar to experts in that field—merely learning subject content is insufficient. Thus it is desirable to investigate how experts think and operate in the real world. How do professionals view content knowledge of the field? What meaningful connections do they perceive among this information? How do they apply this structural knowledge to actual procedures and problem solving? And how does an investigator determine this in order to inform the instructional design of an educational program? To discover the mental process behind expert performance, cognitive and procedural techniques can be applied to produce mental models, which are internal conceptual and operational representations of a subject or system developed over time and experience. Cognitive maps can be generated that reveal how individuals structure their knowledge of a subject, showing meaningful connections among terms and concepts. These maps can then be compared to actual performance of a problem or task, analyzing how they approach a task and what they are thinking throughout the process. The literature supports the conclusion that experts think and behave quite differently from novices; therefore a great deal of study has been performed analyzing and comparing the mental models of experts and novices in a variety of disciplines. The purpose of this study was to compare the mental models of professional recording engineers in the music industry with seniors enrolled in a music recording degree program at a four-year college. The results were intended primarily to inform the instructional design and implementation of the program as well as to provide recommendations that can be applied to other similar educational programs. Eliciting structural knowledge of recording engineering concepts involved the application of the card sort procedure. Participants sorted a list of 20 terms and concepts into piles that indicated how they thought they related to each other. This data was then used to produce visual cognitive maps through multidimensional scaling statistical techniques. Procedural knowledge was analyzed by having participants think aloud as they completed tasks using Digidesign’s industry standard Pro Tools recording software. Operational and thought patterns were then derived through analysis and comparison from both sets of data. As expected, the expert engineers possessed a more refined, highly structured knowledge of the field that enabled them to figure out various tasks even if they were inexperienced with the specific software used in the study. Differences between individual work experiences and personalities also led to variations in how they perceived recording systems and procedural situations. Student performance varied in terms of structural accuracy and ability to accomplish the tasks, but overall indicated a largely coherent mental model of how recording systems operate. One of the chief problems was the software itself; most often participants were clear on what they needed to do, but those with less experience with the Pro Tools system had difficulties understanding the fairly cryptic interface design. The few poor performers also suffered from inadequate mental models of how to solve the problem, compounding their lack of knowledge of the software. Recommendations are provided for designing similar instructional programs.