Study On Student's Subject Cognitive Structure Measurement And Diagnosis

Traditional tests can not satisfy the requirement from society and cognitive diagnosis tests which serves for instruction in a very different way from the traditional tests is being on the rise. Essentially speaking, the difference between them is in that cognitive diagnosis tests help us learn more about the individualists'cognitive process and characteristics on a certain knowledge field. The research here mainly measured and diagnosed students'cognitive structures of biology by using the Fill-In-The-Structure technology which is more easy to be operated and more detailed than other method such as pathfinder analysis, concept mapping and so on. After obtaining the students'cognitive structures of biology by the FITS technology, the research compared them with the instructor's cognitive structure of biology and thus got a series of results on various measures of students'cognitive structure. Then, based on these results the research firstly analyzed and diagnosed the cognitive struc- ture towards all the students; secondly analyzed the differences of the cognitive struc- ture between the two extreme groups divided by the level of biology knowledge; thirdly analyzed the differences of the cognitive structure between male and female. In addition, to further learn about the significance to the instruction and the diagnostic function of the cognitive structure produced by the Fill-In-The-Structure technique, the research chose a typical individual case to do a much more detailed diagnostic analysis on the cognitive structure. Finally, by the correlation analysis among the various measures of cognitive structure and the correlation analysis between the cognitive structure measures and the average biology performance of the students, the research probed the relations between the cognitive structure measures and their validity. By all the analyses above, the research found (1)FITS technique is indeed a valuable method of measuring and diagnosing the cognitive structure. It can provide more information on teaching and learning than traditional tests and thus can explicitly direct the differential treatment. (2)most of the cognitive structure measures were independent between each other in some degree, and this showed they were likely to have measured something in different aspects. (3) some items of the cognitive structure measurement were significantly related to the average biology performance, which showed these measuring items of the FITS technique are valid. While other items showed low confidence of correlation with the average biology performance, which reflected the differences between the cognitive structure diagnosis tests and the traditional tests. Of course, all the methods of cognitive structure measurement and diagnosis has its'advantages and disadvantages, including the FITS technique, so if we can combine the FITS technique with other methods, I believe the prospect of cognitive structure measurement and diagnosis will be better. Meanwhile the combination is a problem worth a further research.