Concept mapping

Concept mapping is a technique to visualize the relations between concepts. A concept map is a diagram showing the relationships between concepts. Concepts, like "tree" or "plant", are connected with labelled arrows, for example ("is-a", "related-to" or "part of"). The addition of labeled and flexible links (attached during or after construction) has been found to significantly improve the level of meaningful learning and communication of the concept mapper.

Concept maps are widely used in education and business for:

• Note taking and summarizing
• brainstorming
• Increasing meaningful learning
• Communicating complex ideas and arguments
• Enhancing metacognition (learning to learn)
• Enhancing memory
• Improving language ability

Concept mapping can be contrasted with the similar idea of Mind mapping. However the latter tends to utilise radial hierarchies and webs (tree structures), wheras concept maps allow any kind of connections between the concepts (true flexible graph structure).

This text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License