The Contribution of Instruction in a Knowledge Mapping Technique to Students' Understanding of Texts

An experiment to assess the effects of instruction in a knowledge mapping technique on students’ learning performance in Economics was conducted in four secondary schools in the State of Selangor, Malaysia. Instruction in a note-taking technique served as a control condition, and a pre-test-post-test design was utilised. The study involved 135 Sixth-Form Economics students (24 males and 111 females) and four Economics teachers. The effectiveness of the technique was assessed by four types of assessment tests, and the tests were developed on the basis of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives for the cognitive domain (Bloom, 1956), and followed the procedure suggested by Gronlund (1982). It was hypothesised that the knowledge mapping technique would assist students to perform better in the performance tests in comparison with the control group using the note-taking technique. The influences of gender, ethnicity, cognitive style and learners’ characteristics were also assessed. Furthermore, the research also investigated the effects of the technique on measures of students’ self-efficacy beliefs and cognitive effort investment.