Cognitive visualization as a support instrument by individual education
Uglev, Victor, Kovaleva, T.M. · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2015
The process of individual education, as the most effective form of gaining domain knowledge can be intensified through the organizational methods (involving a tutor), hardware (using computing technology), and psychological techniques (in particular, applying a cognitive visual representation). Of particular interest is a combination of traditional and computer-aided tutor support for individualized learning approaches based on the specific means of mapping. A tutor is an intermediary between a student (pupil) and a teacher or between a student and a knowledge source in case of self-learning to orient the educational process to the student's personal goals and implement the L. S. Vygotsky's mediation principle. Thus, the tutor faces a task to identify the personal learning goals, disclose the learning prospects and its supports, but the student plays a role of a decision-maker. One of the nuclear problems of tutorage is making an individual educational or didactic path, which expects making a kind of distinctive cognition route. An application of cognitive visualization as a tutor's tools, is aimed, primarily, at a comprehensive representation of subjective educational student's space. A student has to be oriented inside this space to reach the denoted goals. In this context it is possible to formulate the navigation problem, which may be solved it in the most rational way by educational space mapping and navigating in it at any moment of the educational process. All three basic qualities of maps (the presence of different spatial objects in the corresponding metric, vector and scale) can be usefully applied to support an individualized learning process. The paper shows that personality-resource maps can be used for describing the learning situation and building an individual study program in graphical form when the specifics of direct individualized learning is taken into account. Performing both the implementation function and the signum one, a personality -resource map allows a student to update the subject knowledge. Further, the paper offers mapping stages and their application specifics for tutorage. The specifics of tutor's support in computer-aided version have been analyzed separately. The learning automation is based on the intelligent computer-aided teaching systems. An agent model has been proposed to split the learning process roles in the structure of teaching system with selecting the tutor agent and describing the specifics of activities. Problematic aspects are also marked for a tutor agent to make decisions in a particular learning situation, and the possibility to apply the approach of cognitive visualization and mapping, such as cognitive maps of knowledge diagnosis, is noted. The cognitive maps of knowledge diagnosis are the result of completing the information generalization stage (an afferent synthesis by P. K. Anokhin) in the logic of operating computer-aided teaching system to prepare (convert) the information about the learning process into knowledge to simplify a complex expert analysis of the educational situation and develop an adequate response of system to the student's actions. The problems are given, which can be solved by the tutor agent using the cognitive maps of knowledge diagnosis. Further, the paper concerns the aggregative synthesis algorithm for individual course composition and versions of its visual presentation with the map. The structure of the cognitive map of knowledge diagnosis is discussed, in which the static and dynamic parts are distinguished. When storing a map and its visualization, the grouping knowledge effect is realized to form the semantic layers (cuts). The article conclusion notes that at the state-of-the-art stage of didactics development there is a raising extent of manufacturability and cognitive capability of not only the forms of the subject knowledge transfer, but also of the control process itself and teaching support. As a consequence, there is gradual development of a general methodology to apply the cognitive visualization tools to be the meeting-point of psychology, education and information technologies.