9 MARCO TEÒRICO
10.3 El golpe invisible Narrativas de maltrato emocional
Concept maps can be provided to the students by experts or constructed by students themselves. The results of empirical studies indicate that the students benefit greatly when
they generate their own maps (Novak & Gowin, 1984; Moor & Readence, 1984). However, there are many difficulties usually associated with students-generating maps, such as the complexity of the process of constructing concept maps, which often requires much time, and leads to students’ frustration as well as some students dislike drawing concept maps (e.g., Barenholz & Tamir, 1992; McCagg & Dansereau, 1991; McKeachie, 1984; Schau & Mattern, 1997). To bridge the gap between potential problems associated with students-generating maps and achieving the advantages of engaging the students in generating concept maps, some researchers proposed an alternative technique “incomplete concept maps” that combines students’ potential to address expert-generating maps and at the same time having them generate a map, since engaging the students partially in constructed concept maps may increase positive involvement of students in the discussions and learning (Wachter, 1993) as well as facilitating content comprehension and reducing the mental load associated with constructing maps (Chang et al., 2002).
Incomplete concept maps are also known as the fill-in-concept map. In this technique, the students are provided with an incomplete framework of an expert concept map structure of a particular domain as a scaffold in which some of the concepts and/or the linking words have been left out. Students are then asked to fill in the blanks to complete the framework as accurately as possible, according to the expert’s specifications either by generating the words, called “generated-and-fill-in” (e.g., Schau et al., 1997; Surber, 1984) or by choosing from a provided list, called “Select-and-fill-in” (SAFI) (e.g., Schau et al., 1997; Schau, Mattern, Zeilik, Teague, & Weber, 2001). This technique can be described as a strategy that allows students to learn complex concepts and its relationships deeply with hints and prompts involved in the context (Zittle, 2001).
Using incomplete concept maps in face-to-face and online settings has a great potential for learning (e.g., Tsai, Lin, & Yuan, 2001; Vanides, Yin, Tomita, & Ruiz-Primo, 2005). Employing this scaffold may stimulate students to think more about concepts and relations in the content (Schau et al., 1997) and increase meaningful discussions for seeking missing information about the content, which may in turn lead to promote scientific inquiry through the different phases of the design process and positively affect learning outcomes (Baker, 2003; Suthers, & Hundhausen, 2003; Toth, Suthers, & Lesgold, 2002; Wehry, Monroe-Ossi, & Fountain, 2010). Furthermore, incomplete concept maps may be used as representational guidance through the students’ discussions to guide them to find missing information in maps (Suthers & Hundhausen, 2003). With respect to the area of solving problems (e.g., design process) and sciences, supporting groups’ discussions with incomplete concept maps may foster formulation or clarification of ideas (Lampert & Cobb, 2003); justifications, reflections and search for missing information (Brown & Palincsar, 1989) as well as recognition of problems, formulation of questions and co-construction of explanations (Alexopoulou & Driver, 1996; Chan, 2001). Therefore, incomplete concept maps are hypothesized to engage students in high level cognitive and metacognitive processes, enhance
and increase the students’ discussions about the content, and finally improve learning outcomes.
With respect to experimental studies that addressed incomplete concept maps, most of such studies focused primarily on using incomplete concept maps as assessment tools to measure the individuals’ knowledge in computer-based incomplete concept maps (e.g., Akkaya, Karakırık, & Durmuş, 2005; Chang, Chen, & Sung, 2001) and face-to-face settings (e.g., Himangshu, 2010; Schau et al., 1997) as well as comparing incomplete concept maps with students-generated-maps (e.g., Ruiz-Primo, Schultz, Li, & Shavelson, 2001; Schau & Mattern, 1997; Schau et al., 1997).
For example, in a study by Ruiz-Primo and her colleagues (2001), they compared between filling in incomplete concept maps and constructing concept maps regarding students’ knowledge structure. (152) Students from high school chemistry and two teachers participated. At the beginning, the students and teachers were trained to construct concept maps and incomplete concept maps themselves. Through the study, four 20-node incomplete concept maps were constructed. Two of them 12 nodes were left blank and in the other two incomplete concept maps 12 linking lines were left blank. The four incomplete concept maps are (A) incomplete concept map with sample 1 of nodes left blank, (B) incomplete concept map with sample 2 of nodes left blank, (C) incomplete concept map with sample 1 of linking lines left blank, and (D) incomplete concept map with sample 2 of linking lines left blank. The students were tested in three phases, which were (1) all students constructing concept maps by using 20 concepts provided by teacher, (2) half of students filling in incomplete concept maps A and half of students filling in incomplete concept maps B, (3) half of students filling in incomplete concept maps C and half of students filling in incomplete concept maps D. The most important results are filling in incomplete concept maps and constructing concept maps are almost similar regarding students’ knowledge structure as well as engaging students in constructing concept maps reflects better differences among students’ knowledge structure (Ruiz-Primo et al., 2001).
In sum, little is known regarding the effects of using incomplete concept maps in online learning environments on supporting the students through their investigations to learn specific content in a collaboratively way within groups in authentic learning contexts. Thus, investigating the effect of using incomplete concept maps collaboratively as content scaffolding through the CSCL context on domain-general and domain-specific knowledge is still needed. This study is an attempt to fill this gap and to study incomplete concept maps as external support in online learning settings for group collaboration.