A tool to facilitate learning

The beautiful city of Pamplona, Navarre in Spain, was the venue for the First International Conference on Concept Mapping held in September. The four-day conference was organised by the Institute of Human Machine and Cognition (IHMC) and the University of Navarre which also hosted the conference.

About 300 participants from all over the world took part, representing professions from diverse spheres such as research, education, science and business.

Concept maps emanated from research carried out by Joseph D. Novak and his graduate students at Cornell University. It started off as a new paradigm in cognitive learning which highlights the learner's mental processes as the major factor in learning, thus opposing the behaviourists. He set out to delve deeper into how cognitive learning takes place, with his research focusing on Ausubel's learning theory (1968): "If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly."

In Novak's research three ideas from Ausubel's Assimilation theory emerged:

1. New meanings are developed when built on prior concepts and propositions.

2. Cognitive structures are organised hierarchically from the more general and comprehensive concepts towards the more specific ones.

3. When meaningful learning takes place the relationship between concepts becomes more explicit and better integrated with other concepts and propositions.

Thus, during the research, which included hundreds of interview tapes with six-to eight-year-old children, the idea developed to translate interview transcripts into a hierarchical structure of concepts and relationships between concepts, i.e. propositions. The idea cultivated into the invention of a tool known as the concept map.

Concept maps offer a method of representing incoming information visually. They are like visual road maps showing some of the pathways one may take to connect meanings of concepts.

Concept maps involve nodes usually enclosed in circles or boxes and links usually indicated by a connecting line between the two nodes. The concepts are represented in nodes and their relationships to other concepts are specified by the links between them.

Therefore, node-link-node triples in concept maps form propositions. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected with other words to form a meaningful statement.

Constructing graphic representations like concept maps promotes metacognition. One of the values of concept maps is that when children construct their own concept maps for a question or problem in any domain, they clearly convey at a glance, "what the learner already knows" and as educators we can thus plan to build upon this.

For too many years, teachers have planned lessons according to their own preferred way of learning while ignoring the fact that all children process information differently. Children come to school with a baggage of unique needs, ideas, interests, experiences and characteristics. The most important detail about children is that they are thinking rational human beings and each one of them has a unique biography. Therefore, a teacher has to move away from the syllabus and start building upon what the child brings with him/her. The syllabus must serve as a medium through which children can develop their potential.

Students have been conditioned to be passive learners and that learning is a very superficial type of learning. When working with concept maps, students become the agents of their own learning, aware of what they know, whether they have any misconceptions and how well they are developing their understanding. Through the use of concept mapping children become in charge of their own learning, thus promoting quality of learning, thinking and acting.

A growing body of research indicates that the use of concept maps can facilitate meaningful learning while also empowering collaborative learning.

For the past couple of years the IHMC has been developing Cmap tools, a client-server based software kit that is designed to facilitate and support the construction of concept maps by users of all ages and to enable collaboration and sharing during that process. This software facilitates the construction of concept maps just as a word processor supports the task of writing a text.

This software is available in many languages and is used extensively throughout the world. It has evoked a collaborative network where any user, whether a student, teacher, scientist, researcher or businessman, can create their own space and reveal their knowledge models. This kind of new technological idea along with research on meaningful learning can improve and promote a new educational model, which can overwhelm the prevailing model of teachers as disseminators of information and students as inert recipients.

Prevalent learning theories view learning as a process involving no less than three mental process: thinking, feeling and acting. Concept maps capture these three processes; they are a powerful tool in evaluating knowledge, are presented as a personal creation and reflection while empowering learners to be actively involved in their learning. Without knowledge and understanding there is no commitment and only meaningful learning facilitates new learning.

There are good theoretical and empirical reasons which demonstrate that concept mapping is an important metacognitive tool that facilitates meaningful learning and therefore promotes pupils' learning and teachers' understanding of what pupils have learnt, how they learn and what they think.

Ms Vanhear is currently reading for a Masters degree in education and her research focuses on concept maps as a tool to facilitate meaningful learning. She is teaching at Mater Boni Consilii (St Joseph) School, Paola.