Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations

Education is an event that always occurs in a specific context. The context includes emotional, organizational, physical, and cultural characteristics, and each of these include other factors. One of the reasons education is too often ineffective or even destructive results from a limiting context. Some of the complexity of the context for education is shown in Fig. 8.1.

As with all other concepts in my theory of education, each of the concepts shown in Fig. 8.1 interrelate with all the others, some in more significant ways than others. For example, the audio-tutorial lessons we developed for elementary school science lessons, described in the previous chapters, created a special context (an equipped carrel unit) in a traditional classroom in a traditional elementary school in a representative New York State school system. Our primary motivation for developing these lessons was to exercise careful control over the knowledge presented, but important secondary goals were to utilize a wide range of hands-on materials, apparatus, and visual aids to allow some learner control over the pace of instruction and to use examples that were emotionally neutral or positive for students, and also culturally sensitive. Certainly we fell short of the ideal, but the significant, enduring, positive effects on students' achievement indicated that we had a measure of success exceeding that of typical elementary school science learning. An anecdotal comment made by one of our cooperating teachers was, "About the only time George really seems to pay attention in class is the 15 to 20 minutes a week he spends in the science carrel." Our evaluation interviews indicated that George was indeed engaged in learning in the carrel because his performance exceeded that of most of his peers. Kahle and her colleagues ( Kahle, 1976) found that the most striking

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