Knowledge Structures of Entering Computer Networking Students and Their Instructors

Students bring prior knowledge to their learning experiences. This prior knowledge is known to affect how students encode and later retrieve new information learned. Teachers and content developers can use information about students’ prior knowledge to create more effective lessons and materials. In many content areas, particularly the sciences, there is extensive research about the conceptions and misconceptions students bring to the learning environment. This research has used tools ranging from instructor and student interviews to written assessments to identify these ideas. In addition, concept maps have been explored as a way to understand how students relate different concepts to each other. A difficulty with concept maps is that there are not good solutions for studying larger groups of students, but also maintaining the detail to see how specific concepts are related. One way to address this is with similarity ratings and the use of the Pathfinder network program.