Acquisition of hierarchically organized knowledge and prediction of events in world history

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that training in the construction and use of hierarchically organized knowledge would enable students to make predictions across chapters in a 10th-grade world history text. First, a history text that provided only exemplars of the American, French, and Russian revolutions was modified by the insertion of explanatory material on the causes of revolutions. Then, two 10th-grade classes were randomly assigned to experimental and control group status. The experimental group had instruction in: (a) the construction of hierarchically organized knowledge via the use of graphic organizers, and (b) use of this knowledge for predicting events. The control group received traditional instruction. They read the modified text, outlined it, and engaged in regular class discussions of the material. The results revealed that on regular chapter tests both groups displayed equal comprehension of textbased information. However, on an essay test asking students to predict events in the Cuban Revolution which they had not read about in their history text, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group. The results indicate that textbook explication alone of causes of events is insufficient for acquisition and use of hierarchically organized knowledge. Students must be taught how to construct text-based information into hierarchically structured form and use it for making predictions.A reader's prior knowledge or schemata can provide the foundation for making predictions about oncoming information in a text (Anderson, 1984;Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Schema theory postulates that our knowledge is represented in memory in a hierarchical structure such that macrolevel information guides our interpretation of lower-level events and details (Rumelhart, 1984;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).One of the limitations of schema theory is that it does not specify how schemata are constructed (Bransford, 1984). Schema theory simply draws upon general gestalt theory to suggest that readers spontaneously organize their knowledge. Spontaneous organization requires a reader to abstract from a series of exemplars their common properties and group them into a superordinate schema. Presumably, this superordinate schema would then automatically be instantiated by a reader to subsume similar information and to infer missing slots in a text through default assignment.However, simply possessing prior knowledge is no assurance it will be activated. Other reader-based factors influence the degree to which a reader will use existing knowledge to predict oncoming ideas in a text. For example, a reader who learns to organize knowledge hierarchically rather than in a linear list is able to perform an efficient search of memory to generate predictions (Voss, 1984). In addition, procedural knowledge is required in order to use prior knowledge efficiently (Just & Carpenter, 1984). The mental procedures involved in organizing information hierarchically and in using this information to make predictions m...