Knowledge Organization in Science Education
Introduction:
Our working hypothesis for knowledge organization (KO) is --- "to understand is to organize knowledge". To organize new information and relate it with the existing knowledge framework. Organizing knowledge can lead to a proper/correct understanding of concepts.
Knowledge Representation (KR):
In KR, the main components of an ontology are concepts, relations, instances and axioms. The framework of science understanding lies in the core concepts and conceptual or semantic relations. Relations among concepts are central to the way how a semantic knowledge is represented.
Objective:
To develop a knowledge base in biology. We represent the biological knowledge in the form of concepts and the relations they hold, which we call as semantic relations. The representation can help us to understand the conceptual/semantic dependency, construct concept maps and help in establishing relationships among various core concepts, deduce facts based on the semantic relationships.
Approach:
The approach is the knowledge base approach of cognitive science. Knowledge base is a distinct component of the computer system. Knowledge base provides links to the instructional and assessment components, and an intelligent tutoring system takes care of strategies and assessment tasks which are based on the content of knowledge-base.
Current work:
Develop a knowledge base of concepts and semantic relations. (This page is regularly updated).
Classify concepts on the basis of the cognitive role they have and determine their relations (semantic relations) along with each other.
[Click here for a screen shot for kinds of semantic relations]
Assign appropriate semantic relations to the concepts which will provide a logical inference for a query. (The database of concepts and their semantic relations is regularly generated).
[Click here for a screen shot for concepts and semantic relations]
[Click here for a screen shot for concepts and semantic relations]
Develop a minimal set of semantic relations with which the entire domain of biological knowledge can be represented.
Construct concept maps based on the concepts and their semantic relations.
Contrast the structure of knowledge of a novice with that of an expert's structure of knowledge.
References :
Preece, P.: 1978, Exploration of Semantic Space: Review of Research in Organization of Scientific Concepts in Semantic Memory, Science Education, 62(4), 547-562.
Sowa, J.: 1984, Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, USA.
Winston, M., Chaffin, R. and Hermann, D.: 1987, A Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations, Cognitive Science 11, 417-444.
