Kathleen M. Fisher

SemNet: A Tool for Personal Knowledge Construction

Educators are looking for ways to engage learners in deeper level processing of information, SemNet is a tool that engages learners in semantic knowledge representation. SemNet is a cognitive tool that can be used widely to help learners acquire knowledge representation skills.

Osmosis and Diffusion Conceptual Assessment

Biology student mastery regarding the mechanisms of diffusion and osmosis is difficult to achieve. To monitor comprehension of these processes among students at a large public university, we developed and validated an 18-item Osmosis and Diffusion Conceptual Assessment (ODCA). This assessment includes two-tiered items, some adopted or modified from the previously published Diffusion and Osmosis Diagnostic Test (DODT) and some newly developed items. The ODCA, a validated instrument containing fewer items than the DODT and emphasizing different content areas within the realm of osmosis and diffusion, better aligns with our curriculum. Creation of the ODCA involved removal of six DODT item pairs, modification of another six DODT item pairs, and development of three new item pairs addressing basic osmosis and diffusion concepts. Responses to ODCA items testing the same concepts as the DODT were remarkably similar to responses to the DODT collected from students 15 yr earlier, suggesting that student mastery regarding the mechanisms of diffusion and osmosis remains elusive.

Chapter 9 – SemNet Software as an Assessment Tool

Publisher Summary The SemNet© software is a knowledge-representation tool that can help science students shift from rote to meaningful learning. Asking students to self-model their knowledge about a topic with SemNet is a viable alternative to essays for measuring conceptual understanding and it has several advantages over essays. The habit promoted by SemNet-based knowledge construction of retrieving more content in response to a question seems to have a lasting effect. There are at least two significant limitations to using the current version of SemNet as a generative assessment tool. First, students should have prior experience with the software before entering the testing situation. Second, each student must have access to a Macintosh computer. SemNet is a Macintosh-based tool that has been employed with third graders studying ecology; middle-school children exploring difficult topics such as drugs; high-school students studying biology; college students learning history, music, literature, and science; and students enrolled in music and physiology college courses being taught across the World Wide Web.

Generating Connections and Learning in Biology

In this chapter we examine the impact of teaching strategies designed to promote conceptual understanding among prospective elementary school teachers enrolled in a senior level college biology course. Instructional strategies include hands-on experiments and demonstration tasks designed to challenge naive conceptions. Activities utilize everyday materials so that they can be readily adapted to elementary classrooms. There is relatively little lecture, with strong emphasis on small group collaboration and whole class discussions. Students are prompted through questioning and example to develop runnable mental models of the topics being studied. These are comparable to the situation models proposed by Kinstch and van Dijk [18, 19] and discussed in this book by Otero (Chap. 3) and Scardemalia (Chap. 4). Students use a computer-based tool, SemNet™, to make their thinking explicit and visible, to reflect upon their understandings, and to share their thinking with their peers. The chapter describes studies to measure changes in student learning habits, metacognitive processes, retention and retrieval, and learning. SemNet students exhibited significant increases in deep processing. The volume of information retained and retrieved about a topic (the digestive system) by SemNet students was nearly twice that of the Comparison Group. SemNet students acquired certain cognitive skills (such as identifying main ideas and tying ideas together) that carried over into their other courses, according to students’ self-reports. There is evidence for a low level of metacognition among SemNet students (that is, awareness about thinking processes is elicited with specific prompts but not generated spontaneously). Neither Group exhibited transfer skills.

The Information in Relations in Biology, or The Unexamined Relation Is Not Worth Having

Designing good relations is a challenge, as is using them consistently in the context of constructing knowledge representations. Further, the ability to generate and use relations effectively is a feature that clearly distinguishes between good and poor biology students. Fortunately, the SemNet software makes it possible for teachers to diagnose individual student problems in creating and using relations and to provide pencil and paper exercises to build missing skills. Assignments for students engaged in generating or using computer-based knowledge representations are significantly more powerful, in our opinion, when they are designed to prompt student thinking about using and applying knowledge to solve problems rather than to organize textbook knowledge in a relatively inert format. Finally, there are many problems in knowledge representation strategies for science students that remain to be solved.

Generating Connections and Learning with SemNet, a Tool for Constructing Knowledge Networks

In this paper we examine the impact of using a Macintosh-based knowledge organization toll SemNet, with prospective elementary and middle school teachers enrolled in an upper division biology course. The course models for students the ways in which they will be able to teach hands-on, minds-on science in K-8 classrooms and provides them with an in-depth understanding of a relatively small number of biology topics. This study examines changes in learning habits, metacognitive processes, retention, retrieval, and learring among students enrolled in this course. Students using SemNet tend to exhibit a significant increase in deep processing as measured by self-report. Also on the basis of self-report, SemNet students appear to acquire some cognitive skills that transfer to other courses, such as identifying main ideas and tying ideas together. SemNet students retained and retrieved nearly twice as much information about a topic, the digestive system, as a reference group. Although neither the SemNet nor the reference group exhibited transfer skills as we meansured them, there is evidence that SemNet student changed their thinking strategies.