A similar version was published as: Roth, W.-M., & Bowen, M. (1993, January). Maps for more meaningful learning. Science Scope, 16(4), 24-25.
In real life, problems are quite often messy, poorly defined, and call for creative problemsolving. To solve problems, people actively interact with their envi-ronment, learning as they go along and using knowledge from past experience [1]. School learning is often antithetical to real life, cre-ating situations in which students perceive themselves as passive, with neither control over the problems nor choice in selecting problem-solving processes [2]. The discrepancy between real life and school learning negatively affects students' performance and attitudes [3].
At Appleby College, a preparatory school where I formerly taught in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, faculty approach curriculum development and teaching progressively. They make science more relevant to everyday life, so the teaching-learning context becomes more like an apprenticeship for joining a community of practicing scientists. Thus, the faculty provides students with a context that allows students to frame their own questions and answer the questions through investigations. In this open-inquiry process, teachers help students to construct conceptual frameworks for knowledge and acquire new practical and analytical skills.
At other times, students design experiments to investigate questions to which the teachers do not know the answers. In such cases, teachers engage students in the inquiry, make suggestions that the students may or may not follow, and propose hypotheses for students to investigate along with their own.
Teachers demonstrate the use of science skills and coach students to new levels of proficiency in using inquiry skills to research problems of genuine interest to them. Students are truly interested in their research because they choose their own research topics. Faculty at Appleby encourage students to learn meaningfully in an open-inquiry format using two teaching-learning heuristics, the concept map and the Vee map [4]. In this article, we focus primarily on concept mapping. (See Vee mapping articles in the course outline.)
Concept mapping was designed to assist learners in understanding concepts and the relationships between them, to establish hierar-chical relationships among concepts, and to recognize the evolving nature of scientific under-standing. When teaching students to use concept maps, have students map the key concepts from an assigned reading or their findings from a laboratory investigation. Figure 1 shows a concept map prepared by two eighth-grade stu-dents who had just completed an investigation that was part of an eight-week open-inquiry unit on biomes in the school's backyard. The two students had chosen a plot of land on the school grounds and designed an investigation to answer the question, "What type of soil porosity, texture, compounds, and color are there on our plot?"
Have students work in groups on their concept maps. First, give them slips of paper on which to write the concepts they would like to map. It's easy for students to move around slips of paper, maneu-vering them so that associated concepts are near one another. By working in groups, students tend to discuss the material they're map-ping, which helps them to clarify the meanings and relationships between the concepts. After stu-dents have their concepts well placed, they copy down the posi-tions of the concepts onto note-book paper and then draw connecting lines to show inter-relationships. Students draw the connecting lines as arrows and label each with the name of the relationship it describes.
Our studies found that working on concept maps forces students to truly understand information of which they only have an intuitive understanding or understand only through mathematical reasoning. Forcing students to articulate their own ideas in their own words helps students recognize the gaps in their understanding. The concept-map-ping process gets students to reexamine their ideas and consider them in the context of the initial experiment, and to try to connect new ideas to each other and to their prior knowledge. When de-signing concept maps, students frequently realize that they don't really know how ideas are related, leading them to develop new ques-tions to investigate. Also, research shows that group work on concept mapping may reduce students' anxiety [5].
Often we, as teachers, let students develop an intuitive understanding on their own and later provide them with the terminology with which to express their ideas. In contrast to this more conventional learning-cycle approach, concept mapping is less structured. Students learn at their own pace-in much the same way as shop apprentices-receiving individual assistance as they or their teacher perceives the need for it.
[1] Knorr-Cetina, K.D. (1983). Toward a Constructivist Interpretation of Science. In K.D. Knorr-Cetina and M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. London: Sage Publications.
[2] Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Bereiter, C. (1985). Toward a Solution of the Learning Paradox. Review of Educational Research, 55(2), 201-25.
[4] Novak, J.D., and Gowin, D.B. (1984). Learning How to Learn. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
[5] Jegede, O.J., Alaiyemola, E.E., and Okebukola, P.A. (1990). The Effect of Concept Mapping on Students' Anxiety in Biology. Journal of Research in Science Teach-ing, 27(10), 951-60.
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