ABSTRACT
If how you store information crucially influences your problem solving, you need to think about instructional practices likely to cause efficient knowledge organisation. The notion of epitomising is very useful. To epitomise is to provide an overview which is not a preview of all the important course content, but, rather, instruction in a few fundamental and representative ideas and the major relationships among these ideas, thus conveying the essence of the entire content. An illustration of an attempt to epitomise the (cognitive) academic literature on problem solving uses the fundamental ideas of mental procedures and information structures and the relationship between these ideas. The structure of this book also illustrates epitomising, in that Chapter 2 introduces the essence of the book, with more detailed consideration of the ideas appearing in subsequent chapters. A preview of content appears towards the end of Chapter 1 under ‘outline of book’. Notice how this differs from the epitomising of Chapter 2, which introduces all the important ideas that are developed in the later chapters. The learning materials in Chapter 10 for double entry bookkeeping also represent an attempt to translate these notions into instructional plans. Advertisements created by leading agencies are also good examples of capturing essence, as are some cartoons.
