Generation of concept maps from medical index terms for diagrammatic reasoning in physiology tutorials

In an effort to demonstrate that diagrammatic reasoning helps people learn new concepts and the relationships between them, we developed a suite of tutorial programs in physiology. The tutorials are based on causal concept mapping. A causal concept map represents a set of causal relationships in a directed graph. We use causal concept maps as a knowledge representation method for medical education to help people understand concepts by presenting the relationships between them in a visual way.; The software consists of a tutorial on causal relationships, an exercise in concept map building, and concept mapper tutorials designed to help students understand the complex negative feedback systems that control blood pressure and breathing in the human body. Our concept mapper tutorial systems help the student build the nodes in the concept map corresponding to the important parameters and then add the causal relationships between them. A prototype authoring tool was also built to help instructors move the system to new domains.; The concept mapper tutorials were evaluated with first year medical students. There were significant differences in their scores during the pre-test and the post-test, suggesting that the tutorials were effective in improving the student's understanding of the physiology concepts. We also report the results of a user survey about our concept mapper system. Use of different colors to identify separate groups of concepts in our concept maps appeared to play an important role in the students' learning process, although this needs to be further demonstrated in future research.; We have also built a concept map from the index terms in a medical textbook for the purpose of constructing and analyzing relationships among the medical terms. Related words from the index entries are connected to each other and displayed graphically to help medical students comprehend the conceptual relationships. The concept map contains the whole collection of index terms in the textbook. A part of the concept map can serve as the basis of a tutorial to provide medical students with necessary knowledge through diagrammatic representation.