CONSTRUCT-VALIDATION OF AN APPROACH TO MODELING COGNITIVE STRUCTURE OF US HISTORY KNOWLEDGE

This research applied evolving conceptions of learning to tackle the d ifficult problems of how students' and experts' cognitive structures m ight be represented and evaluated. A diverse sample of high school stu dents was selected to complete several tasks purporting to measure dom ain-specific knowledge of the Great Depression period of US. history, including prior knowledge, written explanation, similarity ratings, an d concept mapping tasks, In this study, the technical characteristics of a method for scoring student concept maps were explored by comparin g directly the quality of student maps with expert maps, Results showe d that experts' concept maps could be used to score students' concept maps reliably, Further analyses showed that students who judged simila rities of pairs of concepts, facts, and events from the Great Depressi on era in an expert-like manner constructed more correct links for tho se same pairs in their concept maps. MIMIC (multiple indicators, multi ple causes) structural modeling was used to analyze relationships amon g causal and indicator measures of the construct ''cognitive structure .'' Two concept-mapping measures (semantic content score, organization al structure score) and two writing task dimensions (content quality a nd argumentation) were chosen to represent indicators of the construct , The findings provided some evidence to support the theoretical posit ion that domain-specific measures, not general achievement measures, p redict performance on construct indicators