Collaborative concept mapping: provoking and supporting meaningful discourse

Students articulate their thoughts

As expected, collaborative concept mapping engaged students in discourse about the physics concepts. The students articulated their thoughts about, and experiences with, the concepts. There was almost no off-task talk. The requested group product and the given electricity concepts forced students to pay attention to key principles in the domain, thus stimulating "abstract talk." The average intensity of talk about the electricity concepts was measured as the number of propositions per minute. We defined a proposition as an utterance in which the student makes a statement about the meaning of or a relationship between one or more electricity concepts. The students formulated approximately three propositions per minute. In almost all pairs, the students participated equally in the discourse.

Most conversation about the electricity concepts concerned relationships among concepts. Usually, the formulation of relationships became more precise and specific during the accomplishment of the task. "Resistance and current strength are related" is an example of a proposition with low specification. "If resistance is small, the current strength is large" is an example of a proposition with high specification.

As a result of explaining their own conceptions, students gain a greater conceptual clarity for themselves (Damon & Phelps, 1989). However, Roth and Roychoudhury (1993) reported that some negative outcomes could occur. For example, as a result of working together, students' scientifically incorrect notions sometimes become ingrained or go unchallenged. When a concept-mapping task is used as the introduction to a curriculum unit, however, this could be considered less of a problem and, perhaps, even meaningful. The subsequent student activities and instruction can be focused on an explicit comparison of new information with the conceptions that are expressed in the concept maps. Becoming aware of one's own conceptions, knowledge gaps, and inconsistent reasoning can be considered important conditions for conceptual change, because it may result in a cognitive conflict (Joshua & Dupin, 1987; Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993).

Articulation of ideas also enables students to question or criticize them. A partner can point to inconsistent or incorrect reasoning and elaborate ideas, and both students can co-construct meanings. In the next sections, we discuss the potential of the concept-mapping task to provoke elaboration and co-construction.

Elaboration of conceptual knowledge

Learning concepts requires deep processing activities, such as the active use of prior knowledge, the recognition and acknowledgment of problems, and attempts to look for meaningful relationships. Because a concept-mapping task is an open task with no predetermined or fixed answers, collaborative concept mapping elicits negotiation. Negotiation processes can be characterized by asking and answering questions, resolving disagreements, and co-constructing meanings. Questions asked during the concept-mapping task (i.e., "What is voltage?" "Why is a voltage resource needed in an electric circuit?" "But what actually is a molecule?") included the acquisition of the theoretical framework of electricity concepts as used by scientists. The fact that the questions were posed by the students themselves seemed to make them eager to search for an answer. In attempting to answer the questions, students can create new relationships by giving examples, using analogies, reformulating, or by referring to school or everyday experiences (see also Webb, 1989, 1991).