Knowledge Construction and Knowledge Representation in High School Students’ Design of Hypermedia Documents

This study documented the processes of knowledge construction and knowledge representation in high school students' hypermedia design projects. Analysis of knowledge construction in linking and structural building yielded distinct types and subtypes of hypermedia documents, which were characterized by four features of knowledge representation: (a) typography, (b) associativity, (c) nonlinearity, and (d) abstraction. Students were found to have diverse knowledge construction processes and considerable variation in their ability to use hypermedia for knowledge representation. Their perceptions of the design experience suggested that difficulty in using hypermedia for conceptual building was related to their lack of experience in intentionally constructing a structural representation. Designing hypermedia documents for content area learning allowed students to be authors of knowledge and thus provided opportunities to develop effective cognitive and knowledge representational skills. This study provided initial evidence of the nature of complex learning in constructing hypermedia documents. Some processes involved in the transformation of knowledge were discussed. However, further research is needed to provide full understanding of the nature of this transformation. ********** Knowledge is a structure with a purpose (Perkins, 1986). When learners "construct their own knowledge" they are constructing a structure that has meaning to them, and when they have accomplished this, it is believed that they understand something better than they did before. The student-as-designer or designing-to-learn point of view (Ehrmann & Balestri, 1992; Wilhelm, Friedemann, & Erickson, 1998) applies this idea of knowledge construction to student construction of artifacts that embody their understanding of certain concepts. For example, science students who are able to successfully support 50 pounds on a bridge constructed from popsicle sticks illustrate their understanding of certain principles of physics. Projects of this sort appear to be very motivating to learners, yet the difficulties in assessing exactly what is learned make many teachers hesitant to take on the promises and challenges of project-based learning. A number of authors (e.g., Lebrer, 1993; Lehrer, Erickson, & Connell, 1994; Wilhelm, Friedemann, & Erickson, 1998) suggested that the design of hypermedia artifacts is another way for learners to represent their understanding. Jonassen and his colleagues (Jonassen, Myers, & McKillop, 1996; Jonassen & Carr, 2000) believed that the authoring of hypermedia artifacts is among the most engaging constructivist activities. This was certainly found to be the case, particularly at the high school level, in the Doing Science project (McGrath et al., 1996/1997) and in at-risk students' learning and motivation (Liu & Rutledge, 1997; McGrath, Sylvester, & Chen, 1999). Making Thinking Explicit Hypermedia authoring is one of a number of design processes that can help learners make their thinking and understanding visible (Carlson, 1990; Dede, 1992; McFarlane, Williams, & Bonnett, 2000), and thus better open to critical examination. When used as a tool to link together conceptual elements, hypermedia allows many ways of organizing information, looking at the content, and representing knowledge structures and conceptual relationships (Jonassen, 1988). In this way, hypermedia appears ideal for the constructive, creative, recursive, and analytical elements of design (Ehrmann & Balestri, 1992). In addition, hypermedia can support collaboration, metacognition, and the development of higher-level information processing strategies (Carlson, 1990). Rumelhart and Norman's (1978) three modes of learning, accretion, restructuring, and tuning, provided a useful framework for identifying different levels of learning. Accretion refers to the accumulation of knowledge in one's knowledge base; restructuring refers to the reorganization of one's existing knowledge structure; and tuning refers to a continuing modification of the existing knowledge structure to improve the accuracy, generalizability, and specificity. …