Diagramming prior knowledge in the classroom

Abstract

Engaging the student's prior knowledge is considered by educational researchers to be an important part of constructing a strong foundation for new learning. Diagrams are one technique used in the classroom. Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon described the computational advantages of diagrams over text when used to communicate information in their 1987 article entitled "Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words." This presentation describes a novel abstract diagramming technique designed to be facilitated in the classroom. Using paper and crayons, the participants create three diagrams that represent the externalization of their own prior knowledge of concepts in a domain of study. The presentation illustrates how differences in prior knowledge can be visualized using diagrams with greater speed in less time than the traditional use of textbased descriptions. The student diagrams were shown to contain a hidden conceptual topology, one that is described by Egenhofer in his 1991 article entitled "Reasoning About Binary Topological Relations." This topology is recommended as a framework for structuring and facilitating student collaboration and sharing of prior knowledge and new learning.Discovery of experiential backgrounds with students is often conducted with the use of a common spoken language that is shared by the students and instructor during classroom conversations. Natural spoken languages are rich in content and context. These modalities combine to enable students and instructors to quickly send and receive messages, assign meaning to the interchanges, and generate inferences from the experience. A conversation rarely evokes the need for a lengthy inquiry regarding the prior knowledge of either party. The challenge of exploring prior knowledge using a shared language such as English, limits the depth to which individuals may share their personal worldviews. The inspiration for this article was based on the experience of teaching a three-day technical course in six countries over a period of several weeks. Engineers and managers from the United States, Mexico, Great Britain, Columbia, Brazil, and Sweden were provided a simple rectangle as the over-arching mental model to be used in representing the complexity experienced when managing data warehouses. The use of geometric shapes as an ad hoc grammar to communicate complex topics led to research that formalized the technique in the form of a visual language referred to as Draw Aloud.To better understand how a visual language could be used to communicate the complex epistemologies found in classroom setting, research into the nature of visual language was conducted in the form of a case study at two universities. The students were observed creating diagrams of prior knowledge using a novel abstract diagram elicitation technique. The technique was facilitated in four different classroom settings. The