The purpose of this study was to explore the composition of intellectual capital (IC) by addressing the research question: What are the knowledge-based activities and outputs which comprise the IC of a university medical department? A conceptual framework was developed to highlight the importance of activities. The conceptualization of IC was further developed using concept mapping. Education administrators’ perceptions were solicited to derive IC used in a research faculty of a Canadian university. The results indicate that IC can be understood in terms of activities and outputs. Clinical faculty can be expected to engage in research and its supervision, education, obtaining qualifications, clinical and professional practice, and service. Within these categories, individual activities and outputs were not considered to be of equal importance or impact. Among seventy activities and outputs, articles in internationally refereed journals was ranked as most important, whereas teaching awards was ranked as having the most impact.

The purpose of this study was to explore the composition of intellectual capital (IC) by addressing the research question: What are the knowledge-based activities and outputs which comprise the IC of a university medical department? A conceptual framework was developed to highlight the importance of activities. The conceptualization of IC was further developed using concept mapping. Education administrators’ perceptions were solicited to derive IC used in a research faculty of a Canadian university. The results indicate that IC can be understood in terms of activities and outputs. Clinical faculty can be expected to engage in research and its supervision, education, obtaining qualifications, clinical and professional practice, and service. Within these categories, individual activities and outputs were not considered to be of equal importance or impact. Among seventy activities and outputs, articles in internationally refereed journals was ranked as most important, whereas teaching awards was ranked as having the most impact.

Thesis (PhD) - Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, 2008. / Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, [Faculty of Design], Swinburne University of Technology - 2008. Typescript. Bibliography: p. 348-357.

Small group learning is widely advocated in educational institutions around the world and has drawn constant attention in research. Group interaction is a key component of group-based learning. However, its implementation in existing learning practices is inefficient. Previous studies discussed the use of concept mapping in group learning. Concept mapping as an external representation affords a communicative function that triggers shared cognition in collaborative learning. Empirical work reported the pedagogical usefulness of collaborative concept mapping in supporting group learning processes. However, there lacks an effort in systematically examining the effects of collaborative concept mapping in influencing students’ interactional processes according to frame works of group learning activities. This study in the first part examines the effects of collaborative concept mapping on interactional processes at the cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-emotional dimensions in group learning guided by frameworks of group learning activities. An experimental design method (i.e., concept mapping vs. no concept mapping) is used to examine the effects. Beyond, since task condition is a key issue in determining the effectiveness of intervention elements for shaping interaction, and concept mapping is used for pursuing different types of tasks in educational applications, this study takes task condition into account in the experimental design. A salient problem in collaborative use of concept mapping in distance groups is that participants need to put special efforts into coordination of group activities. Prior studies proposed designing roles functioning at different aspects to structure group activities in collaborative concept mapping. Using roles was found to facilitate task-focused and reflective interaction. However, there is a lack of a systematic view in the design of roles to assist interaction considering the multidimensionality of group interaction. There also lacks empirical investigations into the effectiveness of assigning roles in concept mapping mediated group learning. To address these issues, this study in the second part proposes a role-based approach, i.e., assigning the roles including cognitive leader, metacognitive leader, and socio-emotional leader to participants, in collaborative concept mapping to facilitate group learning processes. An experimental study is implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. The study finds that concept mapping has different effects on group learning in different task conditions. Concept mapping effectively mediates learning processes and leads to superior task performances for conceptual tasks, while functions deficiently neither in mediating group learning processes nor in producing superior task performances for design tasks. Assigning roles in collaborative concept mapping is evidenced to be feasible and useful in improving socio-emotional experiences in group learning. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to gain a fuller understanding of the sort of assistance, support, or education parents feel they need from school counselors in parenting adolescents. The research question examined was: What sort of assistance, support, or education do independent school parents feel they need from school counselors in raising adolescent children? The participants for this study were parents of middle school children attending an independent school located in an urban southern city. All parents of children attending the independent school were asked to respond to an online “needs assessment” survey asking parents to select parent education topics that are of interest to them. Parents participating in this phase of the study had an opportunity to volunteer for the next phase of the study, an online card sort activity. Parents who volunteered for the online card sort activity were sent a link to the online card sort activity where they took a list of parent education topics and arranged them into groups as they saw fit. Analysis of the results revealed nine themes, or categories of topics that are of interest to parents of middle school children: Parenting Skills, Adolescent Self-Management, Self-Awareness and Esteem, Academic Opportunities and Career Choices, Peer Relationships and Skills, Emotional Wellness, Physical Health and Wellness, Parent-Teacher/Staff Communication, and Technology Safety and Use. An informal concept map was created to visually represent the categories of parent education topics that emerged from the study. The results of this study can assist professional school counselors in designing parent education and consultation curriculum and interventions, and help ensure that school counselors better meet parents’ needs.

The purpose of this research is to examine how professionals and civil society members engage in food security activities that include food safety precautions and how they work across differences to support a safe and accessible food supply. The objectives are: (a) to explore tensions between those working in community food security and food safety (regulatory authority) and the source of tension; (b) to explore how people experiencing these tensions can improve the way they work together; and (c) to explore potential opportunities for enhancing health equity through food security and food safety programs. Using a case study design, I employ concept mapping and situational analysis as methods, with a complexity science framework. I have illustrated the complex motives behind food safety regulations and examined the neo-liberal agenda favouring market forces over health equity. I have argued that while there is concern for protecting the public’s health, food safety regulations are not set with a primary focus on protecting people from unsafe food, but are a vehicle for providing confidence in the market and among international trading partners, at the cost of health and welfare of small-scale producers in rural and remote communities. I am suggesting change not only in how we view and understand personal motives or worldviews of food and market forces, but also a shift on a larger scale, to change structural conditions to promote health and to encourage a moral obligation to reduce health inequities. / Graduate / 0573 / 0569 / wmartin@uvic.ca

Implicit concept mapping (iCmap; Aidman & Egan, 1998), measures: (1) the complexity of conceptual activation, and (2) the degree to which integration is internally consistent. These characteristics describe aspects of both Dual Code theory (DCT; Paivio,1986) and of lexical meaning (Johnson-Laird, 1987). Within the DCT literature, two kinds of representations have been proposed, verbal and nonverbal, and in the case of concrete words both kinds of representations will be activated compared to abstract words, which only have a verbal representation. 40 Participants completed Experiment 1, which aimed to assess degree of conceptual change due to learning. The results revealed no change in performance. 120 Participants completed Experiment 2 with a modified task called, progressive concept mapping (proCmap). The results indicated that concrete nouns had greater consistency between trials relative to abstract nouns, whereas abstract nouns had greater complexity. These results provide confirmatory evidence that proCmap is sensitive to information associated with conceptual structure

Cognitive Maps (CMs) have shown promise as tools for modelling and simulation of knowledge in computers as representation of real objects, concepts, perceptions or events and their relations. This thesis examines the application of fuzzy theory to the expression of these relations, and investigates the development of a framework to better manage the operations of these relations. The Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) was introduced in 1986 but little progress has been made since. This is because of the difficulty of modifying or extending its reasoning mechanism from causality to relations other than causality, such as associative and deductive reasoning. The ability to express the complex relations between objects and concepts determines the usefulness of the maps. Structuring these concepts and relations in a model so that they can be consistently represented and quickly accessed and anipulated by a computer is the goal of knowledge representation. This forms the main motivation of this research. In this thesis, a novel framework is proposed whereby single-antecedent fuzzy rules can be applied to a directed graph, and reasoning ability is extended to include noncausality. The framework provides a hierarchical structure where a graph in a higher layer represents knowledge at a high level of abstraction, and graphs in a lower layer represent the knowledge in more detail. The framework allows a modular design of knowledge representation and facilitates the creation of a more complex structure for modelling and reasoning. The experiments conducted in this thesis show that the proposed framework is effective and useful for deriving inferences from input data, solving certain classification problems, and for prediction and decision-making.

Η συστηματική καταγραφή, μελέτη και αξιολόγηση της πορείας οικοδόμησης της γνώσης είναι καθοριστικής σημασίας για την εκπαίδευση και την εκπαιδευτική έρευνα. Ιδιαίτερα όταν η μαθησιακή διαδικασία λαμβάνει χώρα σε συνεργατικό περιβάλλον, προκύπτει η ανάγκη για διαρκή αξιολόγηση της οικοδόμησης της γνώσης τόσο της ομάδας όσο και του ατόμου. Μια ομάδα αποτελείται από μέλη, που έχουν τη δυνατότητα μέσω της συνεργατικής μάθησης να μοιραστούν μαθησιακές εμπειρίες, να αλληλοσυμπληρωθούν και να οικοδομήσουν νέα γνώση. Σε ένα ιδανικό συνεργατικό περιβάλλον μάθησης το κάθε μέλος συμμετέχει ενεργά στην ομάδα και συμβάλει ισότιμα στην ολοκλήρωση των στόχων της. Στα πραγματικά μαθησιακά περιβάλλοντα, όμως θα πρέπει συστηματικά να καταγραφεί και να μελετηθεί η εξατομικευμένη και συνεργατική μάθηση και ο τρόπος που αυτές αλληλοεπηρεάζονται, καθ’ όλη τη διαδικασία οικοδόμησης της γνώσης. Στόχο της έρευνας αποτέλεσε η μελέτη της πορείας της ατομικής και συνεργατικής οικοδόμησης της γνώσης μαθητών, η καταγραφή των παραγόντων που τις επηρεάζουν και η διερεύνηση πιθανών αλληλεπιδράσεών τους. Στην προσπάθεια αναζήτησης πιο ευαίσθητων, σε σχέση με τα παραδοσιακά τεστ, καταγραφέων της μαθησιακής διαδικασίας και των αλλαγών που διαδραματίζονται καθώς αυτή συντελείται, επιλέχθηκαν οι εννοιολογικοί χάρτες. Οι εννοιολογικοί χάρτες θεωρούνται κατάλληλο εργαλείο για την παρακολούθηση και καταγραφή της μαθησιακής διαδικασίας τόσο της ομάδας όσο και των μελών που την αποτελούν. Η κατασκευή τους δε, με κατάλληλο λογισμικό εννοιολογικής χαρτογράφησης προσφέρει μεταξύ άλλων τα πλεονεκτήματα της εύκολης αναθεώρησης, αποθήκευσης και διευκόλυνσης της συνεργατικής μάθησης. Τέλος ιδιαίτερης σημασίας θεωρείται ο τρόπος αξιολόγησης των χαρτών. Για να είναι αποτελεσματικός απαιτείται ένα συστηματικό, ποιοτικά προσανατολισμένο και παράλληλα απλό και αξιόπιστο στην εφαρμογή πρωτόκολλο ανάλυσης των εννοιολογικών χαρτών. Στην εργασία που ακολουθεί παρουσιάζεται η ερευνητική διαδικασία, μελέτης περίπτωσης, που διεξήχθη με ενδεκάχρονους μαθητές της έκτης τάξης του δημοτικού σχολείου. Σε συνθήκες πραγματικής τάξης, και με τη χρήση λογισμικού εννοιολογικής χαρτογράφησης, οι μαθητές αναπαρέστησαν τις εννοιολογικές τους δομές και την πορεία που η οικοδόμηση της γνώσης τους ακολούθησε σε ατομικό και ομαδικό επίπεδο, κατασκευάζοντας εννοιολογικούς χάρτες εξατομικευμένα και συνεργατικά πριν, κατά τη διάρκεια και μετά τη διδασκαλία μιας διδακτικής παρέμβασης με θέμα: «Ενέργεια, Περιβάλλον και Ζωντανοί Οργανισμοί». Οι ακολουθίες ατομικά και συνεργατικά κατασκευασμένων εννοιολογικών χαρτών αναλύθηκαν με τη χρήση ενός πρότυπου πρωτόκολλου ανάλυσης εννοιολογικών χαρτών που αναπτύχθηκε στο πλαίσιο της παρούσας έρευνας και αναλυτικά θα παρατεθεί παρακάτω, ώστε να καλύψει τις ανάγκες μια πλήρους, ποσοτικής και ποιοτικής αποτίμησης των εννοιολογικών χαρτών. Η ερευνητική διαδικασία οδήγησε πρώτα απ’ όλα στο συμπέρασμα ότι οι ακολουθίες ατομικά και συνεργατικά κατασκευασμένων εννοιολογικών χαρτών, αξιολογημένων με ποιοτικά κατά κύριο λόγο κριτήρια μπορούν να παράσχουν μια λεπτομερή καταγραφή της οικοδόμησης της γνώσης μιας ομάδας, των μελών της αλλά και των αλληλεπιδράσεων αυτών. Επίσης αναδείχθηκε ο ρόλος των νοητικών αναπαραστάσεων, οι οποίες τόσο ατομικά όσο και συνεργατικά συχνά επηρέασαν την πορεία της οικοδόμησης της γνώσης, καθορίζοντας τον τρόπο διαχείρισης της νέας γνώσης. Τέλος καταγράφηκαν και άλλοι παράγοντες που επηρέασαν την οικοδόμησης της γνώσης, όπως το φύλο, η προσωπικότητα και οι σχέσεις των μελών μιας ομάδας. / The systematic recording and evaluation of knowledge construction is of critical importance in learning studies. In particular, when the learning process takes place in a collaborative environment, then a permanent evaluation of knowledge construction is needed both for group members and the group as a whole. Group members interact and share learning experiences aiming to construct new knowledge. In an ideal collaborative environment each member would participate actively and contribute equivalently to the fulfilling of the group aims. In real learning environments, however, this remains to be proven by the systematic recording both of the individual and group knowledge construction, as well as the evaluation of contribution of each member to the collaborative learning process and vice versa. The aim of the present research was to study the individual and collaborative knowledge construction of students, searching for the factors that influence the interaction of those during the learning process. Concept maps were selected as recorders of knowledge construction, as these are considered a suitable and sensitive tool for revealing the participants’ conceptual structures and for recording the learning process of both group and group members. Their construction, with suitable concept mapping software offers among others the advantages of easy revision, storage and facilitation of collaborative learning. In addition, we considered assessment methods of concept maps in order to develop a protocol of analysis that would allow an effective and systematic assessment, both qualitative and quantitative and at the same time simple and reliable in the application. In the thesis that follows a case study research is presented, which was carried out with the participation of eleven years old students of sixth class of Greek elementary school. In real class conditions and with the use of concept mapping software the students represented their cognitive structures in various phases of a course in individual and collaborative level, constructing concept maps individually and collaboratively, before, during and after teaching on the subject: “Energy and Environment”. Sequences of individually and collaboratively constructed concept maps were evaluated with the use of a model protocol of analysis of conceptual maps that was developed in the frame of present research in order to have a complete, quantitative and qualitative assessment of concept maps. The analysis of concept maps of group members and groups have led us to conclude that first of all individual and collaborative learning process and their interaction is revealead through the evaluation of concept map consequences, especially when a qualitatively oriented assessment protocol is used. Also, we led to the conclusion that the conceptual representations of a group and of its members often influences the process of collaborative and individual learning by defining the way which they manage new knowledge. In addition, other factors such as gender, personality and relation of group members also influence the knowledge structure process.