The Assessment and Modification of Concept Interrelationships

The purposes of the present experiments were to assess the structure of a set of conceptual interrelationships in a group of college students and design and implement an intervention technique to change the conceptual structure. The assessment was performed by having subjects make a comparative rating of each pair of a set of concepts taken from the basic learning section of the introductory psychology course (e.g., reinforcement, unconditioned stimulus). The ratings were treated by multidimensional scaling to reveal aspects of the concept interrelationships. The intervention technique in Experiment 1 was a special lecture designed by noting the major discrepancies between the concept structure of the students and that of the authors of the present study (the reference structure). The special lecture of Experiment 1 failed to significantly alter the conceptual structure of the students. In Experiment 2 another intervention technique was designed which reduced the number of concepts singled out for alteration and required the students to make active comparisons of the concepts. In this instance the intervention produced a substantial shift in the students’ concept structure in the direction of the reference structure.