Impacts of concept and vee mappings and three modes of class interaction on students’ performance in genetics

Summary

This study examines the impacts of concept and vee mapping heuristics under cooperative, cooperative‐competitive and individualistic learning conditions on students’ performance in genetics. Data were collected from 270 fourth‐form students involved in a pre‐test‐post‐test experiment with control groups. Students taught genetics using concept and vee mapping strategies under the three learning modes performed significantly better than their counterparts taught genetics without the use of concept and vee mappings under the same learning modes. Students in the cooperative‐competitive condition, in both the experimental and control groups, performed significantly better than their counterparts in the other two groups, while the cooperative‐competitive students in the experimental group performed significantly best. The implications of the findings of this experiment for the teaching of science are discussed.