Cognitive maps make it possible to represent not only what a person knows, but also how they relate, organise, and structure that knowledge. The study by Alba Guiral and Manoli Pifarré explores this potential in initial teacher education through a technology-mediated science learning experience.
The study involved 47 students enrolled in the Primary Education degree programme at the University of Lleida, who worked in small groups for 25 hours to address a socio-scientific challenge related to drinking water and water management. In a collaborative digital environment, they constructed maps that made concepts, relationships, and different stages of scientific inquiry visible. Before and after the experience, they also individually created a paper-based map on drinking water, allowing the researchers to analyse changes both in their scientific knowledge and in the way they represented it.
The results show clear changes between the two points in time. At the beginning, most students demonstrated relatively undeveloped knowledge and tended to represent ideas as isolated facts or through simple relationships. After the experience, the level of scientific explanation increased significantly: almost nine out of ten students were able to develop at least partial explanations of the concepts assessed. The structure of the maps also became richer.
The final representations incorporated more relationships, hierarchies, and groupings among concepts, while the use of network structures—associated with a more complex organisation of knowledge—also increased. Particularly interesting is the fact that these differences appeared in individual maps produced without technology, suggesting that some of the ways of organising and representing knowledge practised during the collaborative experience may subsequently have transferred to individual work.
The significance of the study therefore extends beyond the use of a particular digital tool. Here, technology serves to make reasoning visible, support discussion among students, and help represent a process of inquiry into a complex scientific problem. Cognitive maps also show considerable potential as an assessment tool: they make it possible to observe not only which concepts students know, but also how they integrate, organise hierarchically, and connect them.
As this is a case study involving 47 participants and no comparison group, the findings should be interpreted within that context, and the authors themselves propose extending the research to other groups and settings. With that caveat, the study offers a valuable insight for teacher education: educational technologies can contribute to learning when they help students make explicit, discuss, and reorganise the relationships they construct among ideas.
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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
