Concept Map

(The article, EXAMINING CONCEPT MAPS AS AN ASSESSMENT TOOL, is helpful for me to do the analysis. Some of the following terms are from this article. )

Since this is not an easy task for the “victim”, I asked my guinea pig (an Asian male) to choose a topic that he is really interested in. Therefore, I found a website about “Basics of DNA Fingerprinting” http://protist.biology.washington.edu/fingerprint/dnaintro.html according to his interest. Before going into the lesson, I also showed him some concept map examples, so he had an idea of what he is going to do after learning the material.

I decided to ask him to draw a low-directed concept map, which is the concept map that “students are free to decide which and how many concepts they include in their maps, which concepts are related, and which words to use to explain a relationship” (Ruiz-Primo, 2004, p.2) I thought it would provide more room for the subject to reflect his understanding. In addition, I also believe that different people can produce different concept map and I want to see what kind of concept map he will construct. click here to see the big picture of the directedness of the mapping tasks.

Here is the concept map constructed by "Inspiration" after the participant learned the “Basics of DNA Fingerprinting” for about 30 minutes. click here to see the big picture

Although I don’t feel I can use a lot of what I read from Mancuso and Shaw’s article to analyze this concept map task, I do agree one of their perspectives –“meaning is not extracted from nature, but projected by man upon it” (p.21). People construct meaning and understanding by their cognitive system. Take the subject for example. He has engineering background. Although he does not have much biology background, he showed interest to learn the material and may be able to pull out available schema to help him to absorb and organize the information.

However, “concept map” is a new concept for the subject. He felt frustrated to use it to express his understanding. He did not think it is able to fully express what he has learned. Looking at his concept map, he was able to structure an outline/framework of the material, but some information was omitted. I think this could be one of the disadvantages of the low-directed concept map.