Concept Mapping in Education: Teachers Guide

Here is a handy visual we created for the post “9 Great Concept Mapping Tools for Teachers and Students”. We summarized the main points from that post, for more details you can always refer back to the original article where you can also access a list of a wide variety of educational resources to help you make the best of concept maps in your instruction.  More specifically, we provided a working definition of  concept maps, their history and the theory underlying them, and then we talked about some of the main benefits and uses of concept maps in education and concluded with some web tools to help students create digital concept maps.

As for the pedagogical strengths of concept maps, we stated that they:

• Provide students with nonlinear visual ways to understand, produce, and represent knowledge.
• Help develop higher-order thinking skills including analytical skills.
• Facilitate the recall and processing of information.
• Help students externalize their knowledge and show their understanding.
• Make explicit structural forms of knowledge and relationships between concepts and therefore enhance students comprehension.
• They attend to different learning styles.
• They engage students in meaningful learning activities.
• They are effective organizational tools students can use to organize their knowledge.
• Visual representations of knowledge is proved to both stimulate and increase brain activity (Marzono, 1998, cited in Birbili, 2006).
• Boost social interaction, communication and collaborative team work.
• They can be used in different content areas and with students from different grades.

Check out the visual below to learn more about concept maps. Please check the original post for links of the featured web tools.
 
First appeared here