Concept mapping as a means of capturing students’ conceptions of ICT in their world

Concept mapping as a means of capturing students’ conceptions of ICT in their world

The concept mapping task was designed to give the evaluators insights into young people’s conceptualisation of computers in their world, whether it was derived from home use or shaped by the more general process of enculturation through a range of media (newspapers, television, radio, advertising, labelling of goods, etc.) and social interactions (with parents, peers, the icons of youth culture, etc.). The method draws directly on Vygotsky’s conception of ‘instrumental’ psychology (Vygotsky 1978, p. 44) by which ‘higher functions incorporate auxiliary stimuli, which are typically produced by the person himself ( sic)’. In other words, our efforts to achieve any outcome are supported by cognitive tools which are an integral part of our skilled use of actual artifacts. First the ICT tools mediate the leisure (and in Lave’s sense (1996) also learning) activities of the child, making it possible for new objectives to be achieved which would otherwise be unattainable, in a manner that Wertsch (1998, pp. 27–8) compares to the pole’s mediating enhancement of the pole vaulter’s capacity to jump (see the top section of the triangle diagram in Figure 9.1). Second the child’s ability to use ICT is mediated by the ‘auxiliary stimuli’ of his/her own capacity to imagine the possibilities for ICT use. These ideas are clarifi ed in Wartofsky’s account (1979, pp. 198–203) of the role of representation in human perception. For Wartofsky, perception is always an active process, rooted in our cultural history and experience, whereby we use tools (primary artifacts) and are enabled to do so skillfully by our ‘representations of modes of action’ based on our past awareness and experience with these tools (secondary artifacts) and are further able to create ‘possible worlds’ mediated by the tools through our ability to imagine and reorganise these representations of the tools (ibid., pp. 206–7). Although Wartofsky grounds his theory of perception in the Aristotelian distinction between ‘making’ and ‘doing’ within a unifying concept of human ‘praxis’, Cole (1999, p. 91) is clearly right in seeing it as complementing and clarifying Vygotsky’s ideas of higher order auxiliary stimuli. Wartofsky also placed emphasis on the importance of images in perception and characterises imagination as ‘internal representation’ or ‘picturing in the mind’ of alternative forms of action.

The concept mapping task was developed as a means of exploring the children’s conceptualisations of ICT, or to describe the process more specifi cally in terms of the theories of Vygotsky, Wertsch and Wartofsky, to explore their internal representations (secondary artifacts) of ICT by collecting their maps/drawings which gave insights into how they conceptualised ICT objects and the links between them at a particular time. Evidence of well-developed and/or complex secondary artifacts of the role of computers in their world would suggest that they either had skills in ICT use or were well placed to acquire these skills readily, and more likely to be motivated to use ICT autonomously by imagining possible uses and anticipating interesting or useful outcomes.

168 Research methods for ICT in education The concept mapping task was administered to the whole sample of around

2,000 students in ImpaCT2 on two occasions, June 2000 and June 2001. Teachers gave their class a brief introduction to the idea of producing drawings (icons) to

represent their ideas/‘things’ 4 and drawing lines between them to show which ideas/ ‘things’ they saw as linked. The task itself was then introduced by teachers reading aloud a prepared ‘script’ so that, as far as possible, all 2,000 students were doing the same task. Students were told that the purpose of drawing their ‘mind maps’ was to communicate with the ImpaCT2 researchers and that the researchers wanted to know their own ideas: the quality of the drawings was not important so they should try to draw quickly, and not be infl uenced by other students’ drawings. The total time given for the task was 30 minutes, including time at the end for listing the items drawn. The maps suggest that students enjoyed doing this task and took great care with it. They provided the evaluators with a very large amount of information presented in a visual form which was readily accessible to analysis. Although there was some degree of ambiguity in the drawings and links, other problems such as anxieties over spelling and handwriting might have inhibited students in a writing task; although students were inevitably infl uenced by recent experiences to include some objects and not others, this phenomenon would have occurred in the same way in their writing; furthermore, drawing and writing enable different conceptualisations to be communicated (Kress et al. 2001). Some advantages of collecting drawings rather than writing appeared to be: the students’ positive attitude to the task; the amount of information that they were able to give the researchers in a very short time; and the ability of all students to participate equally without some being disadvantaged by poor spelling and handwriting.

The drawings were analysed using a framework that built upon and considerably extended the earlier work of Project REPRESENTATION (Pearson and Somekh 2003). There was no attempt to assess the correctness of the images or the links as the aim was to access students’ conceptualisations not to test their formal knowledge. The number of objects (nodes) drawn, and the number of links between objects were counted. The latter were counted in two stages, fi rst by counting the number of links emanating from each node, and second by totalling the number for all nodes. This enabled us to count extremely complicated maps accurately. The ratio of nodes to links (the ‘connectivity’ score) was then determined by dividing the number of links by the number of nodes. This resulted in a ratio of 2:1 for the two simplest structures of maps (one central node linked to all other nodes; and all nodes linked to two others in a linear or circular form) and up to 7:1 or higher for maps with complex linkages between multiple objects. The latter could be said to bear a greater resemblance to the actual structure of networked technologies, suggesting more developed knowledge. The contents of the maps were then coded within two categories which emerged from an initial qualitative analysis of a sample of 60 maps carried out by two researchers. The analysis was grounded in the phenomenographic approach developed by Marton and Booth (1997) and involved the classic ‘grounded theory’ method of in-depth study of individual maps, followed by listing of conceptual labels, and constant comparisons between maps as further conceptual labels were developed and then grouped into categories (Strauss and Corbin 1990). The two category codes that

Mapping learning potential 169 emerged were: ‘spheres of thinking’ (SoT) and ‘zones of use’ (ZoU). The SoT included

sub-categories of ‘information’, ‘communication’, ‘advanced control mechanisms’, ‘technical details about computers’, ‘games’, ‘music’, ‘images’ etc. The ZoU included ‘home’, ‘school’, ‘workplace’, ‘shopping’, ‘transport’ etc. Drawings were allocated to these sub-categories by the researchers and SoT and ZoU scores awarded to each student on the basis of the number of sub-categories identifi ed within each. The list of SoT and ZoU was revised during the fi rst phase of analysis to include, as far as possible, all types of drawings produced by the students. Since the variety of the drawings was very considerable, the category ‘other’ was retained for any which might still be outside the predicted categories. The team worked together to develop rules to ensure reliable coding, following which inter-rater reliability was checked across the six researchers and surpassed the level recommended by Marton and Booth (90 per cent agreement of ratings on fi rst coding and 90 per cent agreement on the remainder second time around; Marton and Booth 1997).