Concept mapping as an educational strategy to Promote meaningful learning

A major metacognitive learning strategy that appears to improve students learning experience is concept mapping. To determine the effects of teaching by concept mapping method on meaningful learning of a group of bachelor degree program nursing students. Students studied in fourth year of Nursing, Bachelor’s Program, in two nursing faculties located in Tehran were selected by simple sampling method and randomly assigned into intervention and control groups. The selected materials were taught by concept mapping strategy for the intervention group while in the control group traditional lecturing method was used. A teacher-made, criterion referenced test was used as instrument to evaluate meaningful learning of participants in two groups. Based on intended criteria 230 fourth year students wereincluded.25 students were excluded due to lack of one or more including criteria. The remaining students were divided randomly into two intervention (106 students)and control (99 students) groups. The study was conducted during a 5-week period. The results showed that there was a significant statistical difference between the mean scores of retention test of learning in the case (72.40 %) and control (53.30 %) groups (P<0.005). T-test also revealed that there was a significant statistical difference between the mean scores of cumulative post-test for the case group (73.29 %) and the mean scores of cumulative posttest for the control group (68.69 %). Based on our findings it can be concluded that teaching by concept mapping strategy has significant effects on meaningful learning and retention of the students. By addressing these issues it is suggested that more nurse educators would attempt to use the concept mapping strategy in the promotion of meaningful learning.