Prospective Teachers’ Knowledge of Constructing Concept Maps

This paper presents an exploratory study that investigated prospective teachers’ knowledge of concept mapping. Current research emphasizes concept mapping as an important tool in the classroom for teaching, learning and assessment of student learning. Despite the large number of studies on K-12 students’ use of concept mapping, there are very few studies on prospective teachers’ knowledge of concept mapping, and thus, how they plan to use concept mapping as a future teaching and learning tool in classrooms. Data included prospective teachers’ concept maps on two science topics, narratives and interviews used to derive the perspectives that underscored the processes prospective teachers used to create their concept maps. Analysis of data revealed that prospective teachers possessed limited knowledge about: (1) the basic components of the structure and form of a concept map and (2) the processes involved in creating a concept map. The findings indicate that prospective teachers’ knowledge of concept mapping was superficial even though they claimed that they had used or were informed about concept mapping in K-12 classrooms. Additionally, the various structural forms of concept maps constructed by prospective teachers indicated that there was no uniformity in the processes leading to the construction of concept maps. Taken together, the findings suggest that teacher educators need to derive and assess their prospective teachers’ prior knowledge of concept mapping and then provide frameworks to guide their prospective teachers’ proper and acceptable use of concept mapping in their future classrooms.