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Essay on Concept Mapping
Concept Mapping and its Origin
Concept mapping is a technique that allows you to understand the relationships between ideas by creating a visual map of the connections. Concept maps allow (1) to see the connections between ideas you already have (which can be helpful in studying for a test); (2) to connect new ideas to knowledge that you already have (which can help you organize ideas as you find them in researching a paper; and (3) to organize ideas in a logical but not rigid structure that allows future information or viewpoints to be included (which can help you decide how once want to organize a paper). Concept mapping looks like clustering (a type of free writing that is almost completely unstructured and that works by free association), but it goes one step further by revealing a clear relationship between the ideas that you're writing about (Joseph, 1996).
While concept mapping is more structured than prewriting, it is less structured and more flexible than formal outlining (which puts ideas in a sequence and organizes them by hierarchy or levels of importance), and so it allows you to see more complex relationships between ideas than just sequence and hierarchy.
Studies about the effectiveness of concept mapping as a cognitive tool date back to the early 1980s, when a group of researchers at Cornell University became interested in studying changes in students’ understandings of science concepts over a 12-year span of schooling (Novak, 1990). A need for developing a tool to represent students’ understanding of concepts and more importantly changes in students’ understanding over time, led to the creation of a cognitive map (later known as a concept map) as a graphical organizing structure for concepts. Several studies later emerged employing the use of this new visual tool or spatial representation of knowledge..............
