Enabling students' self-regulation and teachers' feedback in concept mapping

摘要

Producing concept maps is often considered troublesome for students. Their self-regulating strategies are limited and the feedback provided by teachers is not always tailored accordingly. As they are associated with deeper learning and knowledge organisation, self-directed regulation and student-centred feedback are important.1 Despite this relevance, few specific tools to enable self-regulation and feedback in concept mapping are described in the literature. This innovation aimed to explore the usefulness of a short reflective tool designed to enable students' self-regulation and optimise teachers' student-centred feedback in a concept mapping activity. Self-regulation implies thinking about one's difficulties and implementing strategies to improve learning. Therefore, the short written reflective tool we developed included two questions: 'What was the hardest aspect of producing your concept map?' and 'How do you plan to remediate this difficulty in producing your next concept map?' First piloted with eight students, the tool was then used unchanged with 98 first-year rehabilitation students in a problem-based course immediately following completion of the concept map.