Concept maps in math teaching


Zorica Marinković




Most professors, even those with years of experience, are sometimes faced with the problem how to present course or lesson content so that students understand it and accept it through meaningful learning. Solution may be found in reducing the amount of teaching material. Changes are definitely needed, not necessarily in a content, but in finding ways to represent it. A concept map is a diagram that depicts relationships between concepts. It is a graphical tool that we can use to organize and, sometimes more important, to visualize content of lesson or theme. The terms (concepts) are commonly written in the ``balloons'' and they are linked to each other with lines and , if needed, words that describe the relationship between them. In this article I present an experiment in which two groups of students participated in creating conceptual maps under different instructions. The experiment confirmed excellent applicability of concept maps in mathematics.