Guiral and Pifarré’s study explores how digital cognitive maps can turn collaborative technological environments into scaffolds for scientific reasoning in pre-service teacher education. The authors designed a learning experience in which 47 future teachers co-constructed digital cognitive maps to address an open-ended socio-scientific challenge on water potability.
The maps, built with visual inquiry icons, made visible the participants’ evolving thought processes, externalizing how they connected concepts, formulated explanations, and refined understanding through dialogue and shared inquiry.
Results reveal a significant qualitative shift from fragmented, linear representations to complex, networked cognitive structures. After the intervention, students not only demonstrated richer conceptual understanding but also developed more integrated strategies for representing scientific ideas.
These “net” architectures show that the technological scaffolds and collaborative mapping promoted higher-order thinking and socio-scientific reasoning, linking inquiry, evidence, and explanation. In doing so, digital cognitive maps served not just as tools for learning but as cognitive artefacts that mirrored the collective reasoning process.
The study positions visual, technology-enhanced inquiry as a key pathway for cultivating scientific literacy and pedagogical content knowledge in future teachers. By representing inquiry visually and collaboratively, students learn to translate complex knowledge into teachable forms.
Beyond the immediate learning gains, the findings point to the broader potential of interactive visual technologies: they help learners externalize thinking, negotiate meaning, and transform abstract science into shared understanding, an essential skill for educators in a digitally mediated world.
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How to Cite: Guiral Herrera, A., & Pifarré Turmo, M. (2023). Digital Cognitive Maps for Scientific Knowledge Construction in Initial Teacher Education. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(2), 89–109. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.2.36067
