C. About Knowledge Mapping

• The knowledge mapping exercises are designed to provide focus, direction, and support for this process, and to give the teacher an opportunity to "look into the students' minds" and monitor their progress.
• Hands-on experiments by themselves produce relatively little learning. They too easily become busy work, done today and forgotten tomorrow.
• For meaningful learning, experiential knowledge must be transformed by the learner into semantic knowledge through a process of personal knowledge construction. Students need to make sense of their observations and link them to their own personal understandings of the world.
• Most knowledge mapping exercises use a Macintosh-based knowledge analysis software called SemNet®, which is available free of charge. Some paper and pencil knowledge mapping strategies are employed as well.

We welcome your comments and suggestions for improving these Knowledge Mapping Exercises.

Part 1, Molecules and Cells

1.1 Properties of Water
1.2 Elements, Atoms and the Periodic Table
1.3 Building Molecules from Atoms
1.4 Basic Processes Part 1 (Creating Family nets with Semnet)
1.4 Basic Processes Part 2 (Basic Processes exercises using Semnet)
1.5 Osmosis
1.6 Pattern Matching (classes of organic molecules)
1.7 Cells
1.8 Mitosis

Part 2, Population Biology

2.1 How Does a Green Plant Grow?

2.2 Owl Pellets

2.3 Chaparral Community

2.4 How Do Organisms Vary?

2.5 How Do Organisms Reproduce?

2.6 How Do Flowering Plants Reproduce?

2.7 How Do Populations Grow?

2.8 How Do Populations Change Over Time?

Authors and Acknowledgements

Correspondence