Concept mapping

A picture is worth a thousand words, if this is true than concept mapping will be a tool that every child will be using in the near future. Concept mapping is a process for drawing pictures to represent and link key ideas in knowledge.

Concept mapping forces the child to think, understand and analyze how the concepts relate to one another, this creative way of presenting information makes learning meaningful. Because concept mapping is hands on it is more likely that children will understand and remember the information more than if they were writing it down. Using concept maps becomes a lot easier and mess free than using pen and paper, instead of erasing a mistake concept mapping encourages children to correct answers as well as modify and reflecting on opinions changing over time.

Concept mapping facilitates brainstorming thus allowing both the teacher and the student a visual plan of ideas along with the flexibility to modify and add to these ideas. Another positive that concept mapping lends itself to is synthesizing information, this skill is vital as it will be used in higher education and later in life. Students use this concept mapping tool not only to record and organize information from many sources in preparation to write, these concept maps grow as the child’s knowledge expands, thus being an expanding project that shows the beginning and the end.

This article states the strategy for information synthesis, these 4 basic steps allow students to think about what they are adding, why they are adding it and reflecting on the project with the ability to reference and change.

1.      Establish a structure

2.      Read and record

3.      Reference and repeat

4.      reflect and reconstruct

This process allows children to establish sources and reference them making their report a lot stronger. It also allows students to reflect on the entire structure allowing them to make connections between symbols and relationships, it can also transform isolated information into meaningful information and finally children can start to think about how they will incorporate this information into meaningful sentences when they write.

As with most things these concept maps have been met with problems these include the small screen however technology has overcome this by using layers. A  second problem is that of not knowing what to mark, what we are looking at is a process before children start to write therefore the skills that they used and the techniques that they have employed should be looked at. Because these maps make sense to the creator we should be looking at the child’s ability to analyze and synthesize material.

http://online.uts.edu.au/courses/1/021310/content/_337582_1/article.htm