Visualizing understanding with concept maps

Engineering education is facing a changing world in which how one thinks is becoming more important than what one thinks; that is, our course content is important but constantly changing and we need to help students learn how to think about that content. One instructional strategy that shows promise is the use of concept mapping, a learning activity that requires students to explain their understanding of important ideas and the relationships among those ideas. This paper describes a pilot project to integrate concept mapping into a Mechanical Engineering Course and the preliminary results of that project.