Enhancing instruction by assessing meaning formation and constructive knowledge: A new education technology cognitive approach

Students who failed a course on computer usability were Required to take a post season corrective course. They provided conceptual definitions to relevant course schemata concepts before and after the learning period that allowed to draw semantic nets by using a natural semantic network technique. In turn, connexionist computer simulated schemata behavior based on these semantic nets allowed to implement semantic priming studies to compare schemata word recognition latencies against other semantic related word pairs. Results showed that by considering meaning formation reports through mental representation analysis a teacher can successfully lead to improve students learning outcomes not only because students pass a course, but assuring long term retention of schemata (schemata priming). Implications to teaching by using this cognitive constructive-chronometric assessment of learning are introduced.