Effectiveness of Concept Mapping on the Academic Achievement of Graduate Students: An Experimental Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68219/0raakc24Keywords:
Concept Mapping, Academic Achievement, Experimental Framework, Instructional StrategyAbstract
Concept mapping is an instructional approach for teaching students to organize, integrate and represent knowledge and can aid them in deeper conceptual understanding. In this study, we consider the possibility of concept mapping improving academic achievement of graduate students in a proposed experimental setting. We contend that graduate-level learning is about connecting concepts and synthesizing information and understanding higher-level concepts. We propose a two-group pre-test-post-test design, where an experimental group is trained through concept mapping and a control group is taught with standard instruction. The academic achievement test is proposed as a primary outcome measure. We also outline how to select participants for the study, how to implement the intervention, test the instruments and data collection and the statistical analysis of the effect size. As a theoretical perspective and from the empirical literature, we believe that concept mapping can lead to better academic performance by facilitating meaningful learning, conceptual organization, knowledge integration and active engagement with the content of the course. The framework proposed here provides a framework for empirically measuring the effectiveness of concept mapping in graduate school and may help foster evidence-based teaching in higher education. Further research is needed to assess the impact of the proposed framework on the results and to better understand the magnitude and statistical significance.
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