type of relations are not. A set of such type of relations constitute knowledge
organizers (see section on methodology) of a body of knowledge, which we
assume are not only constant but few in number. Our hypothesis is: dur-
ing the course of science education if students are trained to understand
the scientific knowledge using the knowledge organizers, then meaningful
learning vis-a-vis rote learning, as explicated by Ausubel[1], takes place.
When we explored for a set of required knowledge organizers for science
(or for the domain of biology) from the literature, we could not obtain with
the exceptions of CYC[12], UMLS[16], any such set readily available. This
indicates that there is a need to develop an authentic set of knowledge or-
ganizers for use in science education. Our research objective is to fill this
gap.
The epistemological presuppositions (the working hypotheses) of this
undertaking are: (1) a cognitive agent understands a new concept when
relations are established between the preexisting concepts with the new
concept[1, 13, 15]; (2) to educate a person therefore is to facilitate the
process of establishing the relevant relations between concepts so as to
align with that of an expert; (3) learning therefore involves restructuring
of conceptual schemes; and (4) misunderstandings are due to mismatch-
ing between conceptual schemes between the agents. According to this
approach no concept gains any meaning independent of its relations with
other concepts. Thus, meaning of a concept is the network it forms with
others. A central difference between the approach followed by Novak and
ours is the emphasis on a minimal set of unambiguous knowledge organiz-
ers instead of using many often ambiguous relations names.
The sense of understanding used here is stronger since we are seeking
that the relations between the concepts be made explicit. For example,
when we look at a tree, and recognize that it is indeed a tree, is also under-
standing of a sort, but it is implicit. Also the term ‘education’ is used here in
a strong sense. This does not cover the various forms of behavioral mastery,
such as skills, that children learn and execute without any explicit under-
standing. One of the challenges in education, particularly of exact sciences,
is to gradually train learners towards more and more explicit forms of
representation. Formal sciences like theoretical physics, mathematics and
logic, for example, are domains of discourse where procedural knowledge
is declaratively stated and declarative knowledge is procedurally stated