Using network analysis to investigate the relation between knowledge organization and transfer

Scientific literacy is an important part of education. Students that demonstrate scientific literacy can organize and coordinate their science ideas to interpret and explain a diverse range of phenomena. This often requires that students are able to transfer their knowledge to new contexts. While some general principles of knowledge transfer have been discovered, we still know little about what exactly enables experts in a field to transfer their knowledge while novices often fail to do so. However, a striking difference between experts and novices is how they organize their knowledge in a domain. We use network analysis to investigate how the organization of students’ knowledge about energy influences their ability to transfer their knowledge to a new context. On this poster, we present first results, discuss their implication and sketch future directions towards automated analyses.