Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

1. How can the use of concept mapping activities engage your students in their learning? Give 2 or 3 specific examples.
In many ways you can use concept mapping activities to engage your students in learning! Concept mapping can be used to organize thoughts, so working with these activities will help the students dig deep to learn. I would use this project to engage my students in learning so they could organize their ideas by using schematic processing. Students can use previous knowledge of the topic to support new information. You can also use concept maps for any type of project! Some specific examples could be assigning students to do a project on the weather, food groups, or animals. For the weather project I would have my students choose a main point and work into specific points. For example, the students could talk about the sun. From the main point there would be branches to similar ideas about the sun that are more complex. The students should branch out their ideas and have at least three sub-topics about the sun. These topics could include what to wear out in the sun, where to go when it is sunny, or what the weather is like when it is sunny. Another idea could be about the food groups. The main idea could be a specific food group where the students must branch out from that idea to make more specific ideas. These ideas could include the types of food in that food group, a favorite food, and how to make a specific food. Another project idea that would allow my students to engage in learning would be about animals. The main topic could be a specific animal and expand from that. It is more exciting for the student to research a specific animal and go into depth about it. If a student were to do their concept map on a bear they could make the bear the main idea and branch out from that to make more specific ideas. These ideas could include habitat, diet, and physical characteristics. All of these ideas are a great start in concept mapping, where the student can easily become engaged when working with this type of activity. Concept mapping allows the students to research and be able to explain their thinking in complex formations. Concept mapping is great and I know I will use it in my classroom!

2. Discuss how concept mapping changes the way your students can demonstrate that they understand a concept or topic you would be teaching.
Concept mapping is a great way to evaluate a student’s understanding of a concept or topic! When the student uses a concept map they are more likely to understand the information because they can organize their information into complex parts. The students have to use deductive reasoning, where they start from a broad topic and work into more specific points. Concept mapping changes the way my students can demonstrate that they understand a concept because it shows that they have thought about their topic thoroughly and have organized it into categories. I could also have my students explain their concept map. They could keep their labels broad and generalized on the map, but then they could present their topic to the class and be more specific. Having students explain their maps to the class will show that they really know the topic I am teaching. I will see that my students understand the material because they are capable of organizing ideas on their map. Concept mapping is a great way for students to demonstrate their knowledge, so this will be helpful for me to use in my class for learning and for assessment.