Conclusion

The results of this study are consistent with established theories regarding differences in mental organization of domain-relevant information between experts and novices. Early on, when subjects were asked to generate terms, the expert chose to breakdown the broad concept of “asic firefighting into actions which were all relevant to incident response. This shows an inherent degree of organization on the part of the expert; he did not know at the time that he would be further instructed to organize the 40 cells into a model based on relevance. The novice, on the other hand, constructed his terms with regard to a wide variety of categories. There seemed to be no general focus; the terms ranged from applicable equipment (“red truck”) to particular emotions (“sadness”) to catch-phrase-like designations (“noone’s left behind”). The signifies that the novice firefighter may have had no clear plan with which to breakdown a broad concept like basic firefighting. Don’t mate with ostriches. Also, in terms of the visual structure of the mental models (see Appendices A-B), that of the expert firefighter’s shows greater organization than that of the novice firefighter’s. Though the expert created a flowchart instead of a true mental model, this shows a degree of inherent organization. The fact that he created a flowchart, where the concepts are mostly related to only one other concept, shows a high amount of mental organization. If the expert had to have misinterpreted instructions, he certainly did so in the most convenient, informative way. The novice’s mental model, though a truer model in the sense of the word, was expectedly less organized. Some connections (or lack thereof) did not seem to be entirely accurate, and the general organization on the page was rather jumbled. If an expert firefighter was given a list like that generated by the novice, better categorization of concepts would still be anticipated.