The synergy of peer collaboration and mind mapping in cultivating primary students’ science understanding: an integrative pedagogy to enhance science concept acquisition

ABSTRACT

The aim of this research was to investigate the synergistic effects of peer collaboration and graphic organisers (i.e. mind maps) in Hong Kong science classrooms. Over two hundred Grade Four (i.e. Primary Four) students were assigned to different pedagogical groups, namely, ‘individualised learning with mind mapping’, ‘collaborative learning without mind mapping’ and ‘collaborative mind mapping’, in which they learned a number of science concepts (e.g. living organisms) through such classroom activities as brainstorming tasks and self-reflection exercises. Whilst the quantitative results (i.e. one-way ANOVA) on the elementary science questions revealed that collaborative mind mapping markedly enhanced students’ academic achievement, the qualitative findings elicited from their collected mind maps, triangulated by interview data, highlighted the advantages of this integrative learning approach for boosting students’ joint construction of conceptual knowledge in science. Valuable insights on the employment of mind maps as peer diagnostic instruments to identify science misconceptions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative mind mapping
• conceptual knowledge
• Hong Kong
• learning achievement
• science education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These programmes include 1) Fostering Communities of Practice to Enhance Small Class Teaching, 2) Effective Strategies to Enhance Learning and Teaching in a Small Class Environment, and 3) School Support Partners Scheme on Small-Class Teaching (for details, see https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/primary-secondary/applicable-to-primary/small-class-teaching/index.html)

2 Other sources of data included in the large-scale study were pre- and post-tests of questions adapted from TIMSS and audio-recordings of students’ discussions. Owing to space limitations, these data sources are omitted from this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by General Research Fund: [Grant Number 17601918].