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International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2222-6990

Knowledge Mapping and Understanding of Economics: A Study in Malaysia

Muhammad Hussin, Ray Crozier

http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARBSS/v11-i2/8887

Open access

An experiment to assess the effects of instruction in a knowledge mapping technique on students’ learning performance in Economics was conducted in four secondary schools in the State of Selangor, Malaysia. Instruction in a note-taking technique served as a control condition, and a pre-test-post-test design was utilised. The study involved 135 Sixth-Form Economics students (24 males and 111 females) and four Economics teachers. The teaching of the knowledge mapping technique utilised the Knowledge Mapping Software for Teaching, Thinking, and Communicating developed by Dansereau and Cross (1990). The effectiveness of the technique was assessed by four types of assessment tests, two representing a lower level of understanding (MCQ1 and Cloze test) and two representing a higher level of understanding (MCQ2 and Essay test). The tests were developed on the basis of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives for the cognitive domain (Bloom, 1956), and followed the procedure suggested by Gronlund (1982). It was hypothesised that the knowledge mapping technique would assist students to perform better in the performance tests in comparison with the control group using the note-taking technique.