Promoting Students' Higher Order Thinking with Concept Map Recomposition

Abstract

Involving higher-order thinking in learning activities can produce meaningful learning. It impacts the student's ability to solve problems in new situations. Concept mapping is a learning strategy that has been proven to promote higher-order thinking. Concept map recomposition (KB-mapping) in the Kit-Build system is a closed concept mapping where learners are given concepts and links to build a concept map, and it has advantage that the recomposed map can be automatically diagnosed. It has been proven that KB-mapping improves the students' learning achievement similar to the traditional concept mapping called scratch concept map composition (SC-mapping). However, the study on the effect of KB-mapping in fostering students' higher-order thinking has yet to be evaluated. This study designed and conducted an experiment to compare the impact of KB-mapping and SC-mapping on promoting students' ability in higher-order thinking. Fifty-four undergraduate students were assigned to either KB-Mapping or SC-Mapping for learning activities. The result of this study suggested that students who learn with KB-mapping had better abilities to solve questions of higher-order thinking than those who applied SC-mapping. The findings also suggested that the quality of students' concept maps affected their performance in solving higher-order thinking questions.