Editorial board editor-in-chief

EDuCATIONAl DECISION DIAGRAmS IN bIOmEDICAl
AND lIFE SCIENCES – ExPERIENCE GAINED
FROm INTRODuCING INTO ANTHROPOlOGY ClASSES
a
leksandra
J. s
tachoń
1
, A
ndrzej
A. k
ononowicz
2
1
 Department of Physical Anthropology, University of Physical Education, Wrocław, Poland
 
2 
 Department of Bioinformatics and Telemedicine, Jagiellonian University Medical College, 
Kraków, Poland
Abstract:
Graphic organizers are visual knowledge representations believed to be helpful in understanding relationships between 
concepts and processes. The goal of this study was to verify whether replacing a linear textbook chapter with an interactive 
graphic organizer improved students’ reaction, knowledge retention and transfer in an anthropology class. The applied graphic 
organizer, an educational decision diagram in recognizing human developmental age based on dentition, was created using 
the Bit Pathways tool. Students were randomly divided into two groups, one using an interactive, web-based graphic organizer, 
the other using a traditional textbook chapter. After a week students were tested on retaining knowledge and practical skills. No 
statistically signiicant differences in learning effect could be observed between the experimental and control group. Nevertheless, 
the results of students satisfaction survey show that students actually enjoyed the class, appreciated innovation in their learning 
activities and subjectively assessed the pathway as more interesting and effective than the textbook chapter.
Keywords:
 
Educational Decision Diagrams, Graphic Organizers, Block Diagrams, E-learning
Introduction
Graphic organizers have a long history of usage in education 
[16,20]. They may be deined as “spatial arrangements of words 
(or word groups) intended to represent the conceptual organiza-
tion of text” [19] or as “two-dimensional visual knowledge repre
-
sentations that show relationship among concepts or processes 
by means of spatial position, connecting lines, and intersect-
ing igures” [16]. The most broad scoped deinitions of graphic 
organizers include several types of diagrams as concept and 
knowledge maps [3, 4], lowcharts [5, 6], hierarchies, matrices, 
and many more [19]. 
Graphic organizers generated by the Bit Pathways applica-
tion [7] form an extension of the classical lowcharts concept 
[22] enhanced by the interactivity of the lowchart components. 
The Bit Pathways lowcharts (called educational pathways) are 
web-based diagrams which present individual steps and deci-
sions involved in a real-life process. The diagrams, exportable 
to HTML-format, display in response to selection of the lowchart 
elements by the learner (via a mouse cursor) a set of attributes’ 
values (attributes taken from predeined templates) linked with 
the selected element. In addition, to reduce the complexity of 
lowcharts, the diagrams may be broken down into a set of sub-
pathways, which may be viewed in a learner-speciied order. The 
primary application of the Bit Pathways program was to serve as 
an aid in clinical pathways authoring [7], however, it turned out to 
be lexible enough to help in creation of graphic organizers also in 
other than medical ields – e.g. chemistry [1, 9] and statistics [18].
Educational pathways have the potential to be a helpful 
learning tool from the viewpoint of the Mayer’s cognitive theory 
of multimedia learning and his principles of multimedia design 
[13]. It is argued that pathways created by the Bit Pathway tool 
adhere to:
(a) the segmenting principle – the lesson is broken down in 
user-paced descriptions of individual process steps rather 
than presented as a continuous unit,
(b) the multimedia principle – pathways have a two di-men-
sional graphical form, the element descriptions may contain 
not only words but also pictures,
(c) 
the signalling principle – the graphical lowchart con-igu
-
ration indicates the correct order of steps involved in the 
described procedure. In addition, values of attributes may 
be formatted (e.g. bolded) to highlight the most important 
messages,
(d) the spatial and temporal contiguity principles – the descrip-
tion of the selected element is displayed in a pop-up win-

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E-lear
ning
Educational decision diagrams in biomedical and life sciences…
dow located next to the selected place immediately after 
activating a lowchart component by a mouse cursor.
There are two substantially different modes of graphic orga-
nizers usage: author-provided graphic organizers (i.e. learning-by-
-viewing) and learner-generated graphic organizers (i.e. learning-
-by-doing) [19]. Despite the merits of active learning promoted 
in the learning-by-doing scenario, a recent study undertaken by 
Stull and Mayer [19] suggests that constructing graphic orga-
nizers may increase the cognitive load because of extraneous 
processing for the diagram authoring and in that way prevent 
effective learning. In this study we focus on the beneits of in
-
troducing author-provided educational pathways into a lesson 
in anthropology rather than constructing pathways by learners. 
Research on learner-generated diagrams is carried out in parallel 
and is reported elsewhere [8, 10]. A second instructional consid
-
eration is whether to present graphic organizers before (advance 
organizers) or after (post organizers) the main learning event. 
More and Readence meta-analysis suggests the latter option, 
however, the evidence for that is still not convincing [15]. In our 
research we decided to present the graphic organizer after an 
introductory learning module.
Goal of this study was to verify whether replacing a linear 
textbook chapter with an interactive graphic organizer (in this 
experiment – an educational pathway) improved students reac-
tion, knowledge retention and transfer in an anthropology class. 
The experiment was carried out at the University of Physical 
Education in Wrocław. Topic of the presented edu-cational path
-
way was determination of the human developmental age. The 
ability to estimate developmental age of children is important for 
physical education students, however, it is often neglected by 
their teachers and coaches. The level of biological development, 
often different from calendar age, determines psychomotor abili-
ties in children [2, 11, 14]. Lack of this knowledge may lead to 
overloaded physical exercises at school or in team sports and 
in turn result in increased risk of injuries and unfair grading of 
children’s efforts. One of basic methods of developmental age 
estimation is analysis of dentition (dental age) – i.e. determination 
of the number and type of erupted teeth [12, 21].
Material and methods
Various kinds of educational materials were prepared for the 
purpose of this study:
–
a virtual patient case “Adaś” containing basic knowledge 
about type and number of primary teeth and permanent 
teeth (Fig. 1),
–
a dentition development pathway (dental pathway) in the 
form of an educational decision diagram for estimation of 
dental age, created by using the Bit Pathways application 
(Fig. 2),
–
anthropological textbook chapter about dental age,
–
test images showing dentition in children.