Coleman, A.S.: Knowledge structures and the vocabulary of engineering novices (2004)
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- Abstract
- This paper describes a study of the language used by undergraduate engineering students engaged in a civil engineering laboratory. Learner's concepts and relationships in the area of soil consolidation were elicited in order to provide an understanding of the structural knowledge of novices and compare it with the knowledge structures of a human expert and a thesaurus tool. Concept maps and pathfinder networks were used to visualise and analyse the resultant knowledge structures of novice learners, expert, and tool. Results show that there is little similarity between the knowledge structures of the novice, the expert, and the tool.
- Content
- 1. Introduction A small study is described which investigated the vocabulary as reflected in the knowledge structures of novices. The research was conducted in order to understand how knowledge organization tools may be designed to meet the needs of novices in the GROW digital library. GROW is the Geo-technical, Rock, and Water digital library, the first step in the establishment of a National Civil Engineering Resources Library (NCERL). Digital libraries are complex entities that have many components: besides the collections of individual resources and the interface to these resources, they have organization, labelling, navigation and searching systems. Controlled vocabularies and thesauri are often the invisible components. This study is based an the premise that the controlled vocabulary influences the above mentioned related components in the digital library. We felt that it was important to understand the knowledge structures of a primary group of user, the novice - the student learner - who is new to the domain. A great deal of research has been done about how people learn and how people use information, but fewer studies link science knowledge structures, vocabulary, and language use.
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