Using Concept Mapping in Vocational Education

In recent years concept mapping has become a powerful tool that is widely used in different contexts in education. This paper describes the using of concept mapping in professional education. Concept mapping is a graphic technique that represents ideas, helps to think, solve a problem, plan a strategy or develop a process. Concept mapping is used in professional education, although not so widely as in science education. The main areas of using are learning and knowledge assessment. There are many different subject fields of using concept mapping e.g. learning in veterinary and law of real property, medical and accounting education. The analysis of 311 scientific articles about concept mapping shows that in professional education this method is more used in the subject fields which are directly connected to natural or exact sciences. In professional education concept mapping is most often used in medical education and engineering education. The main area of use is as an learning tool, often combined with assessment tool. In most articles the faculty and students feedback has been positive and the authors suggested the method of concept mapping for both further use in classroom and research. 1 Concept mapping in education “Concept mapping is a process of meaning-making. It implies taking a list of concepts – a concept being a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label, – and organizing it in a graphical representation where pairs of concepts and linking phrases form propositions. Hence, key to the construction of a concept map is the set of concepts on which it is based” (Cañas et. al. 2003). Today concept mapping is widely and successfully applied in many different fields of education, e.g. concept mapping is widely used in science education (Behrendt et. al. 2000; Fischer et.al. 2001; Reiska 1999, 2005). Much success has been achieved by the application of concept mapping in the teaching process to integrate new concepts into the existing system of knowledge (Novak 1990). Beside the acquisition of new knowledge the testing of achievements is another frequently used area where concept mapping has been applied to teaching process. Outside of teaching process brainstorming and knowledge management are the most used areas of concept mapping. 2 Using concept mapping in professional education: data and method We researched 311 scientific articles about concept mapping and found 18 in which the using of concept mapping in professional education was described. We categorized the articles based on the subject field in vocational education (e.g. accounting education and medical education) and also based on the area of use (e.g. teaching and achievement testing). Based on this information we made conclusions about using of concept mapping in different subject fields and using areas. 3 Subject fields of using concept mapping in professional education