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Collaborative concept mapping: provoking and supporting meaningful discourse

Theory Into Practice, Wntr, 2002 by Carla van Boxtel, Jos van der Linden, Erik Roelofs, Gijsbert Erkens

AN IMPORTANT AIM OF INSTRUCTION in schools is that students learn the concepts that are used within specific domains, and that they improve their ability to use these concepts in their mutually agreed-upon "scientific" meanings. Several authors suggest that students learn domain-specific concepts by using them in spoken communication--through talking about and "with" concepts (Duit & Treagust 1998; Lemke, 1990; Palincsar, Anderson, & David, 1993). From this point of view, then, collaborative learning tasks have a strong potential to contribute to the learning of concepts, because they can provide students with the opportunity to talk about and use them to describe and explain phenomena. In addition to the composition of the group, the group size, the reward structure, and the preparation for group work, the task itself has an important role in shaping the quality of the student interaction (Derry, 1999; Van der Linden, Erkens, Schmidt, & Renshaw, 2000; Webb & Palincsar, 1996).

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In this article we discuss the potential of collaborative concept-mapping tasks. In our research, we used a concept-mapping task in three experimental studies. Participants in the studies were 15- to 16-year-old students from secondary-level physics classes. The students collaborated in pairs on a concept-mapping task that functioned as the introduction to a new course about electricity. In each study, we manipulated the task design and compared the student interaction that emerged in the different task conditions. In all studies, we videotaped and transcribed the student interactions and analyzed the transcripts.

Several studies (Horton, McConny, Gallo, Woods, & Hamelin, 1993) have shown that concept mapping results in meaningful learning. Making a concept map helps learners become aware of and reflect on their own (mis)understandings; it helps students take charge of their own meaning-making. Further, it contributes to the development of an integrated conceptual framework. Most of the concept-mapping studies focus on the construction of a concept map by individual students or a teacher. In line with the findings of Roth and Roychoudhury (1993, 1994) and Sizmur and Osborne (1997), we concluded that concept mapping, as a collaborative learning activity, is successful in provoking and supporting a student discourse that contributes to the appropriation of physics concepts. Students in the three studies in which we used concept mapping as a group task showed significant learning gains (van Boxtel, 2000). It appeared that the learning outcomes were related to the quality of the student interaction. The more talk about physics concepts and the more elaborative that talk, the higher the learning outcomes.

In the following sections, we present our experiences with the concept-mapping tasks used in our research. We identify the features of the concept-mapping task that helped make it successful in provoking and supporting a productive student discourse.

Collaborative Concept Mapping

The concept-mapping task

Concept maps are diagrams indicating interrelationships among concepts and representing conceptual frameworks within a specific domain of knowledge (Novak, 1990). A concept map represents the main concepts and relationships within a domain. It is a network in which the nodes represent concepts, the lines linking the nodes represent relationships, and the labels on the lines represent the nature of the relationships. Within the domain of physics, the relationships between concepts mostly reflect physical regularities. For example, within the domain of electricity, the concepts of voltage, current strength, and resistance can be related to each other. It is possible to describe the relationships among these concepts as follows: "If the voltage increases, then the current strength increases, provided that the resistance does not change." This is a qualitative description of Ohm's law (I = V/R) that accounts for the observation that current strength is proportional to the amount of voltage.

In our studies, pairs of students were asked to construct a concept map on a large sheet of paper, and use a given set of electricity concepts, such as current strength, voltage, energy, and resistance. We expected students to connect related concepts and label the links that represent the relationships between concepts precisely. We chose to work with students from the higher grades because a fruitful discussion about the meaning and use of concepts requires that the participants are at least familiar with the terms and have some initial understanding of the concepts and their interrelationships. It took students an average of 20 minutes to construct a concept map like the one shown in Figure 1.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In the following sections we give a description of the student discourse that was provoked by the concept-mapping task (see van Boxtel, van der Linden, & Kanselaar, 2000 for more details of the study). We will relate the features of the student discourse to the features of the concept-mapping task.

Collaborative concept mapping: provoking and supporting meaningful discourse

Theory Into Practice, Wntr, 2002 by Carla van Boxtel, Jos van der Linden, Erik Roelofs, Gijsbert Erkens

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