Knowledge Study Help
How understanding is central to knowledge structure for a Knowledge Structure Map.
For a Knowledge Structure Map (KSM), prerequisite knowledge means knowledge which must be known and understood in order for an expert to claim a full understanding of a knowledge item in question. In order for an expert to know something, that expert probably needs to know some other things first. An expert in making tea would know how to boil water. (NOTE: All statements like this can be challenged because it depends on what we mean by making tea).
Understanding is an important component of Knowledge Structure Mapping (KSM). Expertise or the desire to see a KSM as something an expert would know, is how understanding has been applied to a KSM. That is, rather than allowing simple 'KNOW' to be the determiner of a prerequisite, it has been an EXPERT who KNOWS' which has been the determiner.
As far as a KSM is concerned, if someone knows how to summarise, that means that an expert in summarising knows how to summarise. It is then not enough for that expert to simply know about decomposing a task, the expert must understand how to decompose a task. Decomposing a task is a prerequisite of how to summarise. An expert in summarising needs to be able to decompose a task and understand task decomposition in order to claim such expertise. The idea of learning dependency is valid but not if we call it knowledge dependency (simply knowing).
When a developing expert learns things like how to summarise, it is more than likely that the developing expert will attempt to summarise before having gained a full understanding of task decomposition. The developing expert would certainly need to have come across task decomposition before attempting to summaries but the developing expert or learner would probably explore summarisation and task decomposition together even though task decomposition is the prerequisite.
The structure of a KSM is valid because task decomposition is a component part of summarisation but summarisation is not a component part of task decomposition. In other words, you don't have to fully understand summarisation in order to properly understand task decomposition.
Sometimes these prerequisite structures are not always clear and sometimes they are very clear. Often when they are not clear, it can be because the definition of the element of knowledge in question is not clear and because of this it is possible to hold more than one interpretation of what it means. Solving this problem is therefore related to better definitions. In some cases, it might even be necessary to invent new and very clearly defined knowledge items instead of using the rather fuzzily defined ones.
Learning dependency does not mean that an expert must be an expert in all prerequisite knowledge before even attempting to understand a new knowledge item. It simply means that in order to be an expert in this new knowledge item (rather than simply know it) the expert needs to fully understand the prerequisite knowledge.
