A Knowledge Visualization and Its Evaluation

Ab s t rac t : Visualizing the contents to be learned about an instructional material is an effective way to facilitate learning. However, the effectiveness is not always obtained only by looking at the visualized representation. The knowledge visualization accordingly requires learners to devote more attention it. Considering the context of learning a text, this paper gives an effective knowledge visualization called Diagram Tailoring, and demonstrates an intelligent learning system. This system presents part of a diagram as a visual representation, and encourages learners to construct the whole diagram so that their attention can be devoted to the visualized representation. This paper also describes an experiment on Diagram Tailoring. As a result, we have ascertained that partial diagram presentation makes a contribution to retaining knowledge to be learned from a text. Diagram Tailoring can be consequently viewed as an available way for allowing learners to obtain the intrinsic fruitfulness of knowledge visualization.