Collaborative Concept Mapping as an Instructional Strategy

Given mixed findings on collaborative concept mapping from prior studies, this study attempts to address some of the specific aspects of the technique, namely, key concepts availability and proposition formation, to see whether providing such support would benefit the learners with little prior exposure to the technique and low familiarity with the topic on which they were instructed to construct a concept map. The results, contradictory to what was expected, were that such support did not benefit novice learners. It is suggested that additional research in this area is needed to gain a better understanding of effective use of the technique in group settings.