Abstracts - Earli

activities, their opinion about face to face collaborative team work, their opinion about e-learning,their perceived confidence and their perception of the ease of use of the environment) shed a lighton the personal variables that should be taken into account while implementing AODCenvironments. In our opinion, the conclusion can be drawn that AODC environments can play animportant role to foster learning because of their unique features that can reduce the disadvantagesof face to face collaborative work.B 1928 August 2007 17:30 - 18:50Room: 0.99Paper SessionEducational technologyChair:Margarita Limon, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, SpainRelating students’ epistemological understanding of computer-based models with their reasoningduring modelingPatrick Sins, Utrecht University, NetherlandsWhile many educators and researchers in science have been arguing that students’ epistemologicalunderstanding of models and modeling influences how they cognitively process a modeling task,there has been little evidence directly relating the two. Therefore, in this study students’ level ofepistemological understanding of models and modeling was examined as well as the relationbetween students’ epistemological understanding and the level of their reasoning (i.e., deep versussurface reasoning) during modeling. Twenty-six students, working in dyads, were observed whileworking on a computer-based modeling task in the domain of physics. Students’ epistemologicalunderstanding was assessed on four categories (i.e., nature of models, purposes of models, designand revision of models, and evaluation of models). Results indicate a significant relation betweenstudents’ epistemological understanding and the level of their reasoning. From these results, weemphasize the necessity of considering epistemological issues in research as well as in educationalpractice.Fact-oriented instructional designPeter Bollen, University of Maastricht, NetherlandsIn this paper we will show how fact-orientation can be used as a knowledge structuring approachfor verbalizable knowledge domains, e.g. knowledge that is contained in articles, text books andinstruction manuals further to be referred to as ‘subject matter’. This article will illustrate theapplication of the fact-oriented approach as a subject matter structuring tool for a small part of thesub-domains of operations management and marketing within the university subject of businessadministration. We will also show that the fact-oriented modeling constructs allow us to structureknowledge on the first five levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives and we willshow how the fact-oriented approach complies to the 4C/ID model for instructional design.Moreover, we will derive a ‘knowledge structure metrics’ model that can be empirically estimatedand that can be used to estimate the complexity metric of a subject matter.– 108 –