Exploring students' cognitive structures in learning science: a review of relevant methods

Abstract

Understanding how people think and how people organise knowledge are always major concerns for educational researchers. Hence, educators have developed various ways of representing learners' 'cognitive structures'. This article provides a review of the use of five methods of representing cognitive structures-free word association, controlled word association, tree construction, concept map and flow map. Through comparing the types of analyses that are generated from these cognitive structure representation methods, this paper discusses the applications, as well as the limitations, among these methods.