This study aims to equip students with conceptual modeling skills to address compelling 21st-century challenges in chemistry and chemical engineering education. System-based concept mapping is a critical competence for analyzing global, often complex, problems. We examined how conceptual modeling could scaffold practical experimental design,…

To understand retention, evaluation of guided pathways implementation is an important tool. In an effort to help students succeed, colleges often give students a specified set of core courses and a specific or even prescribed pathway to complete their general education requirements. Retention efforts are always a topic with administrators at…

This study investigated the effects of lecturing, cooperative learning and concept maps on the development of critical and creative thinking skills. A quasi-experimental non-randomized study involved a class of students from the 3rd year of Psychology and two classes from the 3rd year of Pre-service Elementary Teachers. The study ran for 15 weeks,…

Studies have shown that students learning to write in engineering fields struggle to integrate subject matter and communication expertise, and that STEM faculty's communication knowledge often remains tacit, rather than being explicitly taught to students. Here we show a method for eliciting and revealing tacit communication knowledge using what…

We designed an educational activity for undergraduate students and assessed how this newly-constructed activity promoted students' argumentation skills, thereby fostering their epistemic beliefs. This argumentation-based learning activity involved digital concept mapping. A quasi-experimental design involved pretests and posttests that were…

Network science is an emerging area of complexity science that uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems and could represent a new way of quantifying and investigating the internal structure of domain-specific knowledge as approximated by students' concept maps. Students enrolled in introductory psychology constructed concept maps to…

This study was conducted to investigate concept mapping as an instructional technique to help student designers tackle complex issues in instructional design. Specifically, this study focuses on three dimensions: perceived learning, collaborative learning, and usability. We examined how student designers perceived the use of Cacoo as a concept…

Research has shown that retrieval activities, that is, actively recalling previously studied information, may substantially contribute to learning from complex educational materials, sometimes more so than other more popular techniques such as rereading and elaborative study. In this context, recent studies (Blunt and Karpicke, J Educ Psychol…

One of the main goals of gamification in educational settings is to increase student motivation and engagement. To facilitate the design of gamified educational systems, in recent years, studies have proposed various approaches (e.g., methodologies, frameworks and models). One of the main problems, however, is that most of these approaches are…

We present three new standardised network concept map (CM) measures that can provide unique information about learning-related progress, which cannot be determined from previously known measures. Grounded in cognitive development theory on the one hand, and network theory on the other hand, our measures reveal how knowledge is stored, distributed…

For (facilitating) effective learning from texts, students and teachers need to accurately monitor students' comprehension. Monitoring judgments are accurate when they correspond to students' actual comprehension. Accurate monitoring enables accurate (self-)regulation of the learning process, i.e., making study decisions that are in line with…

Like many higher education institutions, amplifying experiential learning (EL) is a priority for the University of Calgary. In order to capture the extent and complexity of EL that exists in an institution, it is crucial to have a common understanding of the concept. In 2018, the University of Calgary created the EL Working Group, tasked with…

With the growing role of online multi-participant collaborations in shaping the academic, professional, and civic spheres, incorporating collaborative online practices in educational settings has become imperative. As more educators include such practices in their curricula, they are faced with new challenges. Assessment of collaborations,…

The aim of the present research was to explore the use of concept maps as an assessment tool. The research question posed was: can concept maps be used to quantitatively assess the learning of a physics topic in an engineering course? This paper describes a new approach to quantifying concept maps. The research was preceded by a pilot project that…

Concept mapping is a form of visual organization that can be used to categorize and represent knowledge about a particular subject or related subjects and foster development of these critical skills. A strategy initiated in the late 1990s (Novak, 1998), concept mapping employs concepts and propositions as central elements in structuring knowledge…