Elaboration knowledge

Finally, the current available elaborated knowledge and the proposed test methodologies are suitable to serve for national or federal authorities and industry as a basis for safety evaluation, establishing criteria and guidelines for the appropriate functional barrier protection design of recycled plastics for food packaging. 

Elaboration knowledge contains elaborations about the main features of the situation or event around which the schema has developed. It is primarily declarative in nature. Typically, specific examples from the individual s experience will be found here, together with general abstractions that can describe these experiences. As some of my research indicates, both verbal and visual information is retained here, as is probably other sensory information. 

Analogical reasoning allows the individual to map the current experience onto a template that has been derived from previous experiences. This template develops as part of the elaboration knowledge of the schema. The abstractions that are part of the schema make up a basic part of this template, and the individual either consciously or unconsciously will attempt to match each of these with some aspect of the current experience. If the abstractions are not well developed, some or all of the mappings may occur between the memory of a specific previous problem, rather than the more general abstract details, and the current problem. 

How is a schema selected Schema selection occurs as the result of pattern matching that utilizes the individual s identification knowledge. Once the basic situation is recognized, the individual then accesses the necessary elaboration knowledge for additional details. 

Elaboration knowledge. The mental model here is faintly reminiscent of a balance scale. If two comparable statements can be found, they need to be weighed one against the other. There are only three possible outcomes The first will be greater than the sec-... 

Elaboration knowledge. There are five basic parts to a Restate situation the two things, the relationship that binds them, and the numerable properties associated with each one. As with the other schemas, an important part of the elaboration knowledge here is semantic The solver must recognize and understand the relationship. It is usually given by expressions such as twice as large as or one-third of, but it may also be stated as a percentage or a proportion. 

One important function of the elaboration knowledge and its related mental model of the situation is to preserve the order expressed in the relationship from its first manifestation to the second. Consider again the age problem introduced above. The two things in this problem are readily identifiable as Mary and her mother. Their associated measurable properties are ages in years. The relationship of interest is that Mary s age is one-third of her mother s age. The importance of the mental model should be evident here. Without an adequate model, the solver might be tempted to apply a formulaic approach that depends on a sequential parsing of the problem, expecting the two statements of the relationship to maintain their order. In fact, as this simple problem illustrates, the order is often disrupted. In this problem, the initial statement is Mary-related to-mother. In the final statement, we... 

Elaboration knowledge. Three problem elements can be distinguished the main subject, an object with which it is associated, and the nature of that association. The mental model constructed by the problem solver will have four slots into which this information is placed. Essentially, two pairs of associations compose this mental model. First, there is the basic statement about the subject, the object, and the association holding the two together. Second, there is a similar statement in which the quantity of either the subject or the object has been varied. Unknown is the variation in the other entity that accompanies it. 

It is useful to consider how schema-based instruction differs from other approaches. One important difference is that schema-based instruction de-emphasizes the quantity of factual bits of information that the student acquires. More is not always better. Factual detail is important, but it is incidental in the development of schema knowledge. It will accrue steadily as part of identification and elaboration knowledge, but it is never the central focus of instruction and learning. The focus is on integrating those facts that are essential rather than on acquiring more and more facts. 

It is probably most efficacious to begin instruction about planning as soon as possible. This usually means overlapping to some extent with the elaboration knowledge instruction. Initially, students will be able to develop only the simplest plans, but they need to understand the importance of planning and to have some model of how to do it. We, as instructors, often fail to show our students how to construct plans. 

Seek contacts with your formerly acquired knowledge (p. 34). (elaboration knowledge)... 

Schema knowledge. Most of the second phase of instruction focuses on elaboration knowledge and attempts to tie it to the newly learned identification knowledge. There are important verbal and visual details to be learned, and it is imperative at this point that students acquire both of these aspects of elaboration knowledge.

Instruction. After the elaboration knowledge instruction is complete, SPS instruction begins to focus on complex problems, that... 

As already described, SPS focuses a part of its instruction on planning knowledge, just as it focuses on identification and elaboration knowledge. In its exercises, SPS requires the student to do one of three things indicate the relative importance of situations... 

In chapter 7,1 describe two experiments that examine the learning that occurs in the initial stages of schema development, especially students ability to recognize the situations and their different elements. The focus here is on students acquisition of identification and elaboration knowledge. 

These experiments provide evidence of students acquisition of identification knowledge, elaboration knowledge, and planning knowledge. They yield a great deal of information about how schemas for problem solving develop. 

What have we learned from PSE First, it is possible to isolate planning knowledge and to examine individual differences in how students develop plans. We can examine direct linkages between planning knowledge and other critical aspects of a schema, such as identification knowledge and elaboration knowledge. We can follow the student s execution of the plan and observe the order with which he or she carries out the necessary steps. 

It is fair to say that markers convey their information as a whole, whereas templates require a parsing of the elements that make up the whole. The two functions are clearly related to each other but they are not identical. Students are content to deal with markers as a whole and make no attempt to work with their different parts, as they do with templates. Moreover, it is possible to acquire the identification knowledge associated with the marker while still lacking the elaboration knowledge required for detailed mapping of problems to templates (as shown in chapter 7). And, the converse may also happen, that is, acquisition of the elaboration knowledge without the identification knowledge. 

Second, an important aspect of the assessment of elaboration knowledge is the inclusion of visual representations, and these should be part of assessment if they are part of instruction. Much of the students knowledge may be linked to specific visual images. The assessment can provide important information about which linkages have been made and which have not. When visual representations are routinely part of assessment, students may rely more frequently on them and may better use the wealth of knowledge that is stored with them in memory. 

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