Le Heron, J., & Sligo, F. (2005). Acquisition of simple and complex knowledge; a knowledge gap perspective. Educational Technology & Society, 8 (2), 190-202. 190 ISSN 1436-4522 (online) and 1176-3647 (print). © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). The authors and the forum jointly retain the copyright of the articles. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the editors at kinshuk@ieee.org. Acquisition of simple and complex knowledge; a knowledge gap perspective Judy Le Heron Senior Tutor The Institute of Information & Mathematical Sciences Massey University, Albany Campus Auckland, New Zealand Tel: +64 9 414 0800 J.L.LeHeron@massey.ac.nz Frank Sligo Associate Professor and Head Department of Communication and Journalism Massey University PO Box 756, Wellington, New Zealand Tel: +64 4 801 5799 ext 6395 F.Sligo@massey.ac.nz ABSTRACT This paper assesses university students’ acquisition of simple and complex knowledge, in exploring whether the knowledge gap hypothesis (KGH) with its origins in community-based research into people’s informal learning from mass media, provides insights into students’ acquisition and retention of information. The KGH posits that attempts to equalise knowledge within a community by releasing new information into it often either has no such effect, or even worsens knowledge inequities. The present study set out to discover if members of a diverse student class, when presented with the same course-related information, both simple and complex, acquired knowledge at similar rates. After formal university education, those with less prior education acquired less knowledge from the same learning opportunities than those with more prior education at each survey point. Second, although entry education level led to different learning outcomes initially, those with less prior education did subsequently achieve the same level of knowledge as those with more prior education. The paper finally reflects on whether existing KGH claims, based on informal education through the media, apply in a formal education environment. Keywords Knowledge gap hypothesis, Simple and complex knowledge, Acquisition of information, Knowledge inequalities, Student learning Introduction A key pedagogical issue in teaching diverse groups of students, especially in a tertiary educational setting currently attracting large numbers of international students from many cultures, is to determine how successfully differing subgroups access and retain course-related information. Traditionally, successful knowledge acquisition and retention are measured by assessment results but this does not reveal the influence of specific factors such as prior educational attainment. The potential contribution to this issue from the knowledge gap hypothesis (KGH) (e.g., Tichenor et al., 1970; Eveland & Scheufele, 2000) is the light it has shed on unequal learning outcomes in informal learning such as in a community context. Distribution of information into a given population, even with the intent to equalise disparate knowledge within it, often has the opposite outcome to that intended. That is, inequality of knowledge among respondents either may not be reduced or is even worsened by such information, perhaps because “information-rich” (those with better possession and command of information) more successfully access and employ new information, in contrast to the “information-poor” (who may lack access to information or the skills to maximise its usefulness). The present study sought to discover if members of a large, diverse class of students, when presented with the same information, acquired and retained that information at a similar rate, or if there were significant differences by subgroups, and if so, what might be the nature of those differences. In particular, we wished to determine any influence of prior educational attainment on knowledge gaps, given that much KGH research has used respondents’ education level as a key differentiator within samples (e.g., Tichenor et al., 1970). The socio- economic status (SES) of students was not investigated primarily because entry to university is usually based on