Having students inspect and use each other's work is a promising way to advance inquiry-based science learning. Research has nevertheless shown that additional guidance is needed for students to take full advantage of the work produced by their peers. The present study investigated whether scaffolding through an integrated support tool could bring…

Concept mapping has been widely used in various fields to facilitate students' organization of knowledge. Previous studies have, however, pointed out that it is difficult for students to construct concept maps from the abundant searched data without appropriate scaffolding. Thus, researchers have suggested that students could produce high quality…

When entering the classroom, adolescents already hold various conceptions on science topics. Concept maps may function as useful tools to reveal such conceptions although labor-intensive analysis often prevents application in typical classroom situations. The authors aimed to provide teachers with an appropriate approach to analyze students'…

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of concept mapping on mastery goal orientation and academic self-efficacy in a collaborative learning environment. The current study employed a randomized controlled pretest-posttest group design to examine if learning strategies such as concept mapping can help students with both reading…

Cognitive scientists have studied internal cognitive structures, processes, and systems for decades in order to understand how they function in human learning. In order to solve challenging tasks in problem situations, learners not only have to perform cognitive activities, e.g., activating existing cognitive structures or organizing new…

This study assessed the influence of using mind maps as a learning tool on eighth graders' science achievement, whether such influence was mediated by students' prior scholastic achievement, and the relationship between students' mind maps and their conceptual understandings. Sixty-two students enrolled in four intact sections of a grade 8 science…