What this unit is about

You may have already learned about brainstorming as a way of eliciting students’ prior knowledge and ideas in the unit Brainstorming: sound. Concept mapping is a very different but complementary technique that is concerned with the organisation of ideas and relationships between concepts. (The term ‘concept’ is used to mean any word or phrase that has a scientific meaning.) The concepts are linked with an arrow and words explain the link. The direction of the arrow shows the way the sentence should be read. An example is given in Figure 1.

Concept maps are particularly appealing to visual learners, but all students can benefit from using them because they are a strategy that can be used in a variety of ways. This unit aims to develop your understanding of how to use the technique of concept mapping as a teaching strategy and assessment tool through the topic of ‘water’.