Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The shape of the memory representation for a 1000 word text was measured for the text's author, 7 independent subject matter experts and 2 groups of novices (N = 83 Air Force recruits). To measure the shapes, w e chose the 12 most important concepts from the text, and then collected proximity data on all possible pairs of them. Then w e made maps of the mental representations from the proximities. In Experiment 1, results of empirical tests of text learning showed that the novices' mental representations after reading the Original Version of the text were correlated only +.1 with the author's or experts' representations. But for a Principled Revision the correlations were above +.5. In Experiment 2, the proximity data from Experiment 1 were used to diagnose specific misconceptions and missing conceptions in both the Original text and the Principled Revision. This revealed unsuspected cognitive misconceptions, as well as intrusions of affective and attitudinal factors into the novices' mental representations. These diagnoses were then used to revise both texts to repair the misconceptions and insert the missing conceptions. Results of empirical tests of these revisions (N = 160 Air Force Recruits) showed that novices' correlations with the author's and experts' representations were shifted close to ceiling (r = + .8 - + .9). These results show that novices' mental representations can be shifted to correspond with experts by using our methods to diagnose and repair misand missing conceptions.