ASSESSMENT AND MODIFICATION OF FLEXIBILITY OF COGNITIVE STRUCTURES CREATED IN UNIVERSITY COURSES

Students' organization of the knowledge that they acquire is an import ant factor in determining the degree to which it is retained and used. In the past we have used the ''fill-in-the-structure'' (FITS) task as a direct method of inferring students' cognitive structures of course content (Naveh-Benjamin, Lin & McKeachie, 1995). This study goes one step further by using the FITS task to assess the flexibility of stude nts' cognitive structures of the material learned; that is, whether st udents are able to relate the same concepts in different ways when the concepts are embedded in two different conceptual frameworks. We asse ssed the flexibility of students' cognitive structures in three studie s by asking students in an ecology course to complete two different st ructures, each based on a different major dimension in the course. Res ults of the first study showed that the FITS technique could be used t o assess students' ability to use concepts learned in the course appro priately in two different frameworks. The flexibility measures obtaine d were positively related to academic performance. The second study de monstrated the usefulness of the technique in measuring the developmen t of conceptual flexibility during the course. Finally, the third stud y employed the technique to show that students' flexible use of concep ts can be enhanced by appropriate instruction. (C) 1998 Academic Press