Prior Knowledge and conceptual models: levelling out the learning field a (bit)

It's a common fact that everyone knows a little (or a lot) about something. That knowledge could be at the level of an expert or completely trivial. It could be well formed and reasoned or, well, just plain wrong.

This is also the case when we consider the participants on a course. There is simply a huge spectrum of in terms of prior knowledge between participants about what's covered in your course.

The challenge that you then face as a subject matter expert, is effectively communicating understanding in a way that can be comfortably assimilated into the participant's knowledge structure. When this actually happens, the result is the emergence of expertise or the reinforcement of an already expert understanding. That's far more easily written than achieved. When we consider all the other confounding factors involved in delivering a learning event, we end up with our standard bell curve of some people not getting it, some kind of getting it and a few who really get it (or probably knew it already).

Specifying some pre-requisites might help, but how many times has that really worked for you? In my case I can honestly say extremely rarely, if ever. Creating pre-instructional events or materials can prove to be really helpful, and gives the participant the opportunity to reinforce their knowledge structure or adjust it to effectively assimilate the knowledge that will be presented in the actual course.

You could imply that successful completion guarantees a place on the programme but that necessitates the need for policy and support for such practice.

There's a lot to be said about pre-instruction, but sometimes creating the content and information can be time consuming and a cost too far.

A possible alternative to developing and administering pre-instructional events is to share a declarative conceptual model such as a concept map with participants prior to the course. Concept maps highlight the concepts within a domain of understanding and specify the nature of relationships between the concepts. This visual snapshot of a knowledge structure is easy to engage with and evaluate. The map can be supported by additional resources that explain the concepts and elaborates on their relationships. The process gives the participants a sound baseline with which they could scaffold their learning. You could then even provide a forum where the map is used to create a dialogue between participants both prior to and during the course.

Concept mapping is a technique developed by Joseph Novak and is based on David Ausubel's theory of assimilative learning. It would also appear to relate to cognitive schema as I would argue that a concept map is akin to a visualisation of a schema (or part of a schema).

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