Procedural knowledge

Applications Research. Specialty chemical producers devote a larger share of their time and costs to appHcations research than do producers of most commodity chemicals. As noted earHer, the most successful specialty chemical producers have been those companies that ate able to respond quickly to customer needs and problems under the conditions found in the customer s plant. This entails having, at the specialty chemical plant, equipment and procedural knowledge which closely approximate those found among customers. Tests can then be mn and a solution to the problem or need may result. If successful, even in part, it can be brought to the customers and tried there. In practice, of course, each customer s plant has some variables which make a single answer or product quite unlikely. Fortunately, slight modifications by the suppHer will often solve the next customer s problem. 

The retention behavior of the eluite alone cannot be used for the unambiguous identification of the compound under study. This is especially important in the analysis of physiological fluids where several different compounds in the matrix may have similar retention characteristics. Thus, a comparison of retention times for the eluting compounds with those of reference compounds that have been previously chromatographed under identical conditions, can only be used for tentative identification. For this identification procedure, knowledge of the type of compounds and their relative levels in the sample is usually necessary. 

Declarative knowledge should be completely decoupled from the procedural knowledge. 

At various times over the past 25 years, cognitive psychologists have found it convenient to postulate two kinds of knowledge procedural and declarative.1 For the most part, procedural knowledge means rule knowledge and has to do with skill acquisition and performance. Declarative knowledge is composed of concepts and facts. A schema does not exactly fit into either of these categories but instead transcends both of them. 

What appears to be missing in both Squire s and Anderson s memory dichotomy is an explanation of how the two types of memories work together. I suggest that both declarative and procedural knowledge are required in any activation of a schema. 

Figure 12.2 shows the main components of Anderson s system. In his conception, declarative memory is a vast network of information chunks that may be connected to each other. All data (i.e., facts, propositions, experiences) are stored in declarative memory. Procedural knowledge is stored in production memory, and it operates on the data of declarative memory. Procedural knowledge consists of production rules. The conditional statements of the rules involve various conjunctions of specific declarative elements that must be true if the production is to fire, that is, if the action specified in the rule is to be carried out. 

At the first year university level, Niaz (2002) observed that students developed only a procedural knowledge of solving electrochemical equations under existing teaching strategies, primarily because they memorised formulae. His teaching approach to this situation is discussed later in the chapter. 

Procedural Knowledge -Primitive Actions -High-Level Plans (RAP )... 

Frames, scripts, and cases are different forms of schemas that represent knowledge as typical stereotypical chunks. Rules and scripts generally represent procedural knowledge, while frames and cases represent declarative knowledge. By formally representing data acquired from knowledge-acquisition techniques, a model of the procedural and declarative knowledge required to perform a task is created. 

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