Knowledge Structures

Abstract

The goal of the university is the advancement of knowledge, but we know little about how knowledge is organized or structured. Important attempts have been made to characterize the structure of a discipline [2, 14, 16], but examination of actual knowledge structures has been limited by the lack of methods available for their study. We would expect that prime examples of knowledge structures would be found in university courses, although most research into university courses has been on teaching procedures rather than on course content. Research suggests, however, that teaching and learning in higher education consist of complex analytic and synthetic processes that create concepts and relate them to one another. The concepts and their relationships in a course should constitute a knowledge structure that can be studied so that its parameters can be understood. This has implications for the improvement of teaching and learning in the university. The key to retention and transfer of knowledge has been posited to lie in the learning of structure, or of how things are related [1, 3]. The teaching process that takes account of the particular knowledge structure in a subject area should provoke better learning. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate the structure of knowledge in courses in various disciplines in the university. The study was exploratory in nature and of a broad enough scope to uncover different structures and to make comparisons among them. An attempt was made to establish some general characteristics of university course material and to understand the perspective of the professor responsible for the course. This was done by selecting model courses in different disciplines.