John W.  Staley

April 18, 2001

 Concept Mapping

Introduction

Concept Mapping is a way of knowing that was developed in the late 1960s by Joseph Novak at Cornell University.  Concept maps visually represent key concepts and the relationships that may exist between each concept.  Much of his work is based on the theories of David Ausubel pertaining to concept learning that stressed the importance of prior knowledge in being able to learn new concepts.  Novak developed concept maps to be a visual tool for the assimilation of new concepts and propositions into existing cognitive structures.  This paper will take a look at the foundational components of concept learning that were developed by Ausubel; explain how one represents knowledge in the visual format of concept maps; and explore appropriate uses and limitations of concept maps.

Concept Learning

Concept learning involves the formation and assimilation of new concepts and their relationship to an individual’s prior knowledge.  Concept formation is a skill that young children usually use to acquire new concepts.  These concepts are often developed through the child’s culture. Culture serves as the primary vehicle through which children acquire concepts that have been constructed over centuries.  As children acquire language rules, they combine them with concept labels that give more precise meaning to events or objects.  Schools are relatively recent inventions for accelerating this learning process.

The construction of new knowledge begins with our observations of objects or events through the concepts we already possess.  Objects are things that exist and can be observed; events are things that happen or can be made to happen; and concepts are regularities in events or objects designated by some label.  These concepts consist of the abstracted criterial attributes that are common to a given category of objects, events or phenomena.  Concepts are given names or labels and can be manipulated, understood and transferred more readily than unnamed concepts.

Concepts free thought, learning, and communication from the domination of the physical environment.  They make possible the acquisition of abstract ideas in the absence of concrete-empirical experience.  Ideas can be used to categorize new situations under existing rubrics and to serve as anchoring foci for the assimilation and discovery of new knowledge.  Concepts constitute the building blocks both for meaningful reception learning of propositions and for the generation of problem solving propositions.

Propositions are defined to be the descriptions of reality that man invents.  It is the grouping of concepts into potentially meaningful combinations that facilitates the generation and understanding of propositions.  Concepts and propositions are the building blocks that formulate the important aspects of concept assimilation because comprehension and meaningful problem solving largely depend on the availability in the learner’s cognitive structure of both superordinate and subordinate propositions.

Subordinate propositions occur when a “logically” meaningful proposition in a particular discipline is related meaningfully to specific superordinate propositions in the pupils’ cognitive structure.  This learning may be called derivative learning if the material simply exemplifies or supports an idea already existing in the cognitive structure.  It is called correlative learning if it is an extension, elaboration, modification, or qualification of previously learned propositions.  Superordinate prepositional learning occurs when a new proposition is relatable to specific subordinate ideas in existing cognitive structure but is relatable to a broad background of generally relevant ideas that can be classified under it (Ausubel, Novak, & Hanseian, 1978).

Concept assimilation is the dominant form used by school children and adults.  The education process actively seeks to change the meaning of experience through the assimilation of new concepts.  David Ausubel’s learning theory focuses on concept assimilation.  His theory views concept and propositional learning as the basis on which individuals construct their own idiosyncratic meanings.  In this process, individuals must choose to relate new knowledge to relevant concepts and propositions they already know.

Concept Assimilation

Concept Assimilation is a sequential process that begins with concept formation.  Concept formation consists essentially of a process of abstracting the essential common features of a class of objects or events that vary contextually.  The learner then generates hypotheses or problem solving propositions that aim at defining the abstracted criterial attributes of the concept to be learned.  This learning process consists of the following stages:

1.      The hypothesis must embody a means-end relationship.

2.      Criterial attributes must be exemplifiable in specific exemplars.

3.      The hypothesis is tested and confirmed or disconfirmed.

4.      Confirmed criterial attributes are related to relevant ideas in cognitive structure that then become meaningful.

It is the process of meaningful learning that involves the acquisitions of meanings and therefore the emergence of new meanings in the learner reflect the completion of a meaningful learning process.

Levels of Concept Learning

Lower-order concepts develop in early years of a learners’ life.  During preschool and early elementary school years, primary concepts are acquired by a process of meaningful, hypothesis oriented concept formation that relates concepts discovered to  criterial attributes of the child’s cognitive structure.  In later elementary years, concrete-empirical props (tangible, perceptible, or verbal examples of attributes) are necessary for concept assimilation.  This occurs when criterial attributes of concepts are presented by definition or context and then related directly to the learner’s cognitive structure.  These concepts are considered secondary concepts.

During junior high school, learners can dispense with props in directly relating presented criterial attributes to his or her cognitive structure.  At this level, concepts tend to consist more of higher-order abstractions; exhibit more precision as well as differentiation; are acquired more through concept assimilation than through concept formation; and are accompanied by an awareness of conceptualizing operations involved.  The assimilation of higher-order concepts involves one or more relationships between lower–order concepts.

Ausubel believed that educating is the process by which we actively seek to change the meaning of experience.  It is the development of higher-order concepts where meaningful learning relates relevant concepts and propositions to learners’ prior knowledge.  This is where concepts maps serve as a valuable tool to externalize concepts and improve thinking.

Concept Maps

Concept mapping is a technique for externalizing concepts and propositions.  They are intended to represent meaningful relationships between concepts in the form of propositions.  A simple example is two concepts linked by a linking word to form a proposition, for example, “math is fun” (Gowin  & Novak, 1984).    They provide a visual road map showing some of the pathways we may take to connect meanings of concepts in propositions.  Concept maps should be hierarchical:  the more general, more inclusive concepts should be at the top of the map, with progressively more specific, less inclusive concepts arranged below them. The capacity for visual recall of specific images is a powerful tool in facilitating learning and recall.

Concept mapping can be used for several purposes:  to generate ideas; to design complex structures; to communicate complex ideas; to aid learning by integrating new and old knowledge; and to assess understanding or diagnose misunderstanding.  Several advantages of concept maps are:  visual symbols are quickly and easily recognized; minimum use of text makes it easy to scan for a word, phrase, or general idea; and it allows for development of a holistic understanding that words alone cannot convey (Plotnick, 1997).

Concept Maps as instructional tools

Concept maps work to make clear to both students and teachers the small number of key ideas that they must focus on for any specific learning task.  As students and teachers construct a concept map, they often recognize new relationships and hence new meanings. Concept maps act as tools for negotiating these meanings and relationships between concepts.  Learning the meaning of a piece of knowledge requires dialogue, exchange, sharing and sometimes compromise in the classroom. Teachers and students exchange views on why a particular propositional linkage is good or valid and they often recognize missing linkages between concepts. After learning a task, concept maps provide a schematic summary of what has been learned.  Concept maps can also be used by teachers to determine pathways for organizing meanings and for negotiating meanings with students, as well as point out misconceptions.  When used by teachers as an instructional tool we must remember to

§         Pay careful attention during pre-instructional planning to the selection concepts selected as the base for the map;

§         Pay careful attention to the selection of words selected to link concepts;

§         Focus on the student’s capacity to identify and enrich the meaning of his or her experience; and

§         Help the student chart a course to get from where they are to the final objective.

Concept maps can be of great benefit to students.  The development of them requires students to perform on all six level of Bloom’s taxonomy.  Teachers must remember that in order for concept maps to be beneficial to students they must be taught how to properly develop them.   Once this skill is learned teachers can use concept maps to help students:

1.    Explicitly see the nature and role of concepts and the relationship between concepts as they exist in their minds and as they exist in the world or on printed or spoken instruction;

2.     Extract specific concepts (words) from printed or oral material;

3.    Visualize concepts and the hierarchical relationships between them;

4.    Keep searching their cognitive structures for relevant concepts;

5.    Construct propositions between the concepts provided and the concepts they know by helping them to choose good linking words or perhaps to recognize what other, more general concepts fit into the hierarchy; and

6.    Discriminate between specific objects or events and the more inclusive concepts those events or objects represent.

Steps for creating, teaching and evaluating Concept Maps

Pre-concept mapping activity

1.          Make two lists on the board using familiar words for objects and another list for events.

2.          Ask students to describe what they think of when they hear each word.  Help them recognize that the mental images we have each word are our concepts.

3.          List the words: are, where, the, is, then, with and ask students what comes to their minds when they hear each of these words.  Emphasize that these are not concept word but linking words.  When put with concepts the form sentences that have meaning.

4.          Have the students practice using two concepts words and linking word(s) to construct a few short sentences.

Concept mapping activity

1.          Select a particularly meaningful paragraph or two from a text or other printed material.  Have the students read the text and select the key concepts for understanding the meaning of the text.  List these concepts then discuss which concept is the most important, most inclusive idea in the text.

2.          Put the most inclusive concept at the head of a new lost of rank-ordered concepts.  List the next most general, most inclusive concepts, working through the first list until all concepts are rank-ordered.

3.          Now begin constructing a concept map, using he rank-ordered list as a guide in building the concept hierarchy.  Use arrows to show important hierarchical relationships between concepts.  Select good linking words to form the propositions shown by the lines on the map.

4.          Look for cross-links between concepts in one section of the map and concepts in another part of the concept “tree.”

5.          Remember that the first map may have poor symmetry or some concept clusters poorly located relative to other more closely related concepts or clusters.  It may take several reconstructions to show a good representation of propositional meanings.

Scoring criteria for concept maps

1.          Propositions: do the connecting line and linking word(s) indicate the meaning relationship between two concepts?  Is the relationship valid?

2.          Hierarchy:  Does the map show meaningful connections between one segment of the concept hierarchy and another segment?  Is the relationship show significant and valid?

3.          Cross Links:  Does the map show meaningful connections between one segment of the concept hierarchy and another segment?  Is the relationship significant and valid (Gowin & Novak, 1984)?

A few final thoughts on Concept Maps

Concept maps are a powerful tool to help students learn about the structure of knowledge and the process of knowledge production.  The visual nature of concept maps helps in the process of concept formation and assimilation.  Concept maps are good conceptual benchmarks from which students can construct richer meanings.    It provides them with the opportunity to analyze their prior knowledge, plan for the addition of new information, guide inquiry from what is known toward what is not, and encourage the recognition of relationships in content areas (Clarke, 1990).    One must remember that we live in a world of concepts rather than a world of objects, events, and situations and there are many internal factors that influence concept learning. We must also remember that the goal of concept mapping is not to produce a “pretty” graphic but to enrich the meaning of a learner’s educational experience.

My personal experiences with concept maps have been limited to Introduction to Education Research and Education Leadership.  Being a true novice at developing concept maps, I struggled with the assignments that required us to develop the conceptual framework of our research interest.  I decided to write this paper to gain a better understanding of this reoccurring topic that I believed would begin to haunt me.  I needed to get a better grasp on how to develop concept maps.  I believe I have reached some level of success and now am beginning to understand what my advisors mean when they ask that famous question about your research interest  “What do you think is happening?”  I am beginning to form the propositions of what I believe is happening with students in their first course of Algebra.  These propositions are the concepts that I have read about, observed and experienced during 13 years of teaching.  At the moment, they form my reality of the situation.  As I continue to develop my research interest  “What do you think is happening” will be a reoccurring question and topic of discussion.  It will give me the opportunity to discuss concepts, links and propositions with my mentors, advisors, and colleagues and expand my thinking on the topic.

The second reason was because I believed it would be a valuable instructional tool.  A tool that would help my students better understand the concepts discussed in class and their relationships to each other and their prior knowledge.  So far it has been beneficial in helping my students link new concepts and prior knowledge; understand the hierarchal relationship of related concepts; and assessing their general understanding of instruction, but only time will tell of the benefits that concept maps play in their learning experience.