APPLICABILITY OF WORD-ASSOCIATION METHODOLOGY FOR IDENTIFYING, SELECTING, AND ORGANIZING CONCEPTS IN POWER AND ENERGY TECHNOLOGY FOR USE IN CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Today\u27s American crisis in education has been said to be graver than the one confronted over 25 years ago when the Russians launched sputnik. Our youth are technologically illiterate, living in a world that is increasingly technologically oriented. A major criticism of public education has been its lack of content relevant to this social need. The purpose of this study was to investigate the applicability of using continued free word-association and factor analysis to identify, select, and organize content for use by curriculum developers. Analysis resulted in a hierarchical arrangement of concept-clusters, graphically depicting the cognitive knowledge possessed by a sample of individuals knowledgeable in various phases of Power and Energy Technology (PET). Instrumentation used for data collection consisted of (a) a Stimulus-Word Generation task, (b) two forms of a Word-Association Instrument (WAI), and (c) a Validation Questionnaire. Raw data were response-words elicited from 33 participants through continued free word-association to 79 stimulus-words administered in the WAI\u27s. Data analysis was performed by first pooling all response-words for each stimulus-word across participants forming 79 response-word distributions. A measure of similarity for each possible pair of distributions was calculated in the form of a relatedness coefficient. Continued higher-order factor analysis was performed on each successive correlation matrix until a hierarchical structure of concepts representing the knowledge possessed by this sample evolved. The labeled hierarchical structure was then returned to participants for their evaluation of its face validity. Estimates of reliability for the WAI/data collection process and the data analysis procedure; and an evaluation of the face validity of the PET hierarchical structure and WAI/data collection procedure from this study are congruent with findings of previous research on this topic. The methodology used in this study seems a feasible alternative to traditional methods of identifying, selecting, and organizing content. By utilizing a sample of experts currently engaged in the topic area under investigation, the resulting content hopefully will be more accurate, up-to-date, and relevant to society\u27s needs