The goal of this project is to explore how an adaptive concept-mapping tool can ease students' cognitive overload and assist them with creating conceptual connections across a course. The adaptive map tool can assist students in visualizing large stores of information in a way that mimics the approaches of subject-matter experts and thus promotes learning. The adaptive map tool is being implemented and assessed in a Statics course, one of the core courses for several engineering disciplines. The research team is leveraging information in existing content repositories (such as textbooks) in order to minimize the effort needed for development of the adaptive map tool. The findings from this project are being disseminated through conferences and journals and through a dedicated website.
Traditional textbooks contain significant educational content, but the navigational mechanisms to access that content are limited and, more importantly, not designed with learning in mind. To address this gap, the research team developed the "Adaptive Map," a novel organization and navigation tool designed to help students better understand large collections of information such as those found in textbooks. The tool promotes conceptual understanding by leveraging expert-generated concept maps, which have been shown to improve learning. In addition, to alleviate problems associated with visually processing large-scale concept maps, the design integrated information visualization techniques to increase usability and facilitate processing. The Adaptive Map tool presents material at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from a concept map presenting broad overview of all subjects (Figure 1A), to concept maps for individual content sections (Figure 1B), to detailed text on each topic (Figure 1C). Through this "layered" graph algorithm, the concept map format serves as an advance organizer. The visual presentation of the map is controlled by the user’s level of abstraction (how zoomed in or out they are) and the focus topic. Based on this user-selected information, the software presents a visual of the most relevant topics to the current focus at an appropriate level of detail for the current level of abstraction. Users interact with the tool by clicking and dragging around the background to pan, using the scroll wheel or the + and – buttons to zoom out, and clicking or double clicking on nodes to center on the node and open the node respectively. Through these inputs, the users can easily and intuitively choose their focus and level of detail within the large-scale concept map. The Adaptive Map tool (with engineering statics content) can be downloaded at adaptivemap.ma.psu.edu. To evaluate the approach, the Adaptive Map was tested in an engineering Statics class. A multiple case study approach was used to explore how students used the tool. Four research questions guided the analysis. RQ1: How are students engaging in learning activities with the proposed tool? How does this differ from the learning behaviors students engage in with traditional textbooks? Students using the Adaptive Map tool are more likely to exhibit behaviors that indicate advance organizer usage and prior content exploration than students using a traditional textbook. That is, they are 1) viewing and processing an overview of the information before trying to process the detailed content information, and 2) reviewing topics from previous sections that are relevant to the section they are currently studying. RQ2: How do these observed learning behaviors promote or hinder the formation of conceptual understanding? Those students who viewed and processed an overview of the subject area before reading detailed content information had higher measures of conceptual understanding, and had cognitive knowledge structures that better matched the structures provided in the overview. Those students who did not view an overview or paid little attention to an overview engaged in more rote learning, and had more varied cognitive knowledge structures which did not match the overview provided. The Adaptive Map encouraged students to process an overview of the information more so than the traditional textbook. Students using the Adaptive Map tool were far more likely to address relevant prior topics when studying information. Students were asked to study and then teach the researchers a section from the book during the course of the semester. Those students using the traditional textbook only examined the section assigned, while users of the Adaptive Map tool often viewed topics outside of the assigned topic area. The majority of this exploration was focused on the topics that the assigned section built upon. By reviewing these subjects while studying, Adaptive Map participants were better able to connect the topics to relevant prior knowledge. RQ3: Are students experiencing cognitive overload during any of the observed learning behaviors, and if so how is this affecting the learning process? Students using the Adaptive Map tool did not seem to experience higher cognitive loads than students using the traditional textbook. Students who reported particularly high cognitive loads in either group, though, performed poorly on learning measures, reaffirming the value of cognitive load theory in this context. RQ4: What factors contribute to students adopting or not adopting the proposed tool for learning activities? Students identified the tool’s map layout, simple and more conversational language, and search feature as primary reasons for adoption. Notably, research participants adopted the tool at a high rate, but few outside this group did so, despite being provided with access. Together, these findings address the primary goal: An Adaptive Map tool designed using information visualization techniques helps users manage cognitive load while viewing large concept maps. Results show that the tool promoted conceptual understanding by facilitating advance organizer usage and students’ exploration of relevant prior content.
