The task used in the present study was learning about tornado formation by watching an animation on a BBC website ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7533941.stm). The participant had at most 10 mins to watch the self-paced animated model. Immediately after watching the animation, the participant was asked to produce a concept map. As the concept map itself, the learners` knowledge on how a tornado form seems to be linear in that what information node leads to another in a linear fashion. This is not surprising given that the learning task was procedural and followed a certain order of events. Specifically, it described the steps involved in tornado formation in a certain order. It is interesting that the participant used sentences between the elements or nodes of the concept map instead of just inserting arrows. I think this refers to the organization or structure of the schema like concept map seen above. With that being said, a certain portion of the information is missing in the concept map: Levels of The Fujita Damage Scale and their associated sample damages. This is interesting but seems to be explainable: My hypothesis is that since the participant figured out the main learning task is procedural s/he started to build his or her concept map in a “procedural” way. However, the highly missing damage scale part was a sort of conceptual learning part and included a certain amount of declarative knowledge. Consequently, the participant seems to have stopped adding these conceptual details to his or her procedural concept map. After all, tornado formation was diagnosed as a procedural knowledge type and structured in that way. Given that s/he did not report lack of time on task this seems to be reasonable.
Another interesting that needs to be thought of is the flow of the concept map. Even though it refers to a linear procedural knowledge pieces, its shape somehow fluctuates. Speculatively, there could not be some connections between this flow of the concept map and knowledge constructed after watching animated model, which seems to be beyond this assignment.
Finally, the concept map and its corresponding knowledge seem to be based on action as described by verbs naming the arrows interconnecting different information nodes of the concept map. This seems to suggest that mental models or schemas consist of interconnections among information nodes that can be in not only static structure but also active structure. It is a pity that the concept map depicts only the interconnections between information nodes not among information nodes. 8))
References:
British Broadcasting Corporation. (n.d.). How a tornado is formed. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7533941.stm
Another interesting that needs to be thought of is the flow of the concept map. Even though it refers to a linear procedural knowledge pieces, its shape somehow fluctuates. Speculatively, there could not be some connections between this flow of the concept map and knowledge constructed after watching animated model, which seems to be beyond this assignment.
Finally, the concept map and its corresponding knowledge seem to be based on action as described by verbs naming the arrows interconnecting different information nodes of the concept map. This seems to suggest that mental models or schemas consist of interconnections among information nodes that can be in not only static structure but also active structure. It is a pity that the concept map depicts only the interconnections between information nodes not among information nodes. 8))
References:
British Broadcasting Corporation. (n.d.). How a tornado is formed. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7533941.stm