Differences In Learning Effects Of Concept Map And Retrieval Practice Among Middle School Students

With the development of modern education,there emerges many new subjects which also become much more difficult for students.It is critical and necessary to select suitable learning methods for effective teaching.Concept maps is a kind of knowledge diagram which can vividly express a series of concepts and their relationships in a propositional network.It can deepen learners’ understanding and memory of concepts by strengthening the relationship between concepts.Retrieval practice refers to one or more recollections of a certain learning content within the same period of time.It promotes memory through multiple reconstructions of knowledge in the process of extraction.The effectiveness of concept maps and retrieval practice has been widely proven,but there are fewer studies comparing concept maps and retrieval practice which are more conducive to memory retention and transfer,and it is impossible to explain in what kind of teaching environment concept maps are better than retrieval practice.According to sorting out the previous studies,some problems are remained:(1)College students especially female are selected as the object,which may affect the learning effect due to the differences in reading ability of different ages and the differences in processing methods of different genders;(2)The drawing groups in the former researches are trained after 50 minutes.They may be unfamiliar with the method of drawing concept map,which will affect the learning effect;(3)Concept maps can reduce the syntactic complexity and redundancy of text information,and improve the ability of information storage and retrieval.However,The existing research materials are short and easy,which may not be suitable for taking advantage of concept maps。Due to the existence of these three problems,although previous studies have repeatedly proved that retrieval practice is a more effective learning method,they lack the consideration of specific problem situations.This has caused certain misleading to the practical application of the two learning methods in teaching.Therefore,this study selects junior high school students(N=215)who are relatively lacking in reading experience as the research object.And this study compares the effect of concept map on middle school students’ memory retention and transfer in terms of gender,concept map proficiency,material difficulty and test interval.Three experiments are included in this study: Experiment one,the moderating role of gender in the contrast concept map and retrieval practice;Experiment two,the influence of different material difficulty and learning methods on test scores;Experiment three is about the influence of different time intervals and learning styles on students’ test scores.Since the main purpose of Experiment 1 is to verify whether the results of Karpicke et al.(2011)are applicable to junior high school students on the basis of gender balance,we conducted 50 minutes of concept map training on the concept map group of Experiment one.The results of the experiment may be affected because students are not proficient in the two learning methods,or the difficulty of the materials is inappropriate;therefore,in the second experiment,the concept map group was trained for 4 weeks to ensure that the students can master the way of using concept map,and the influence of the difficulty of the material on the test score is taken into account;we assume that the students are proficient in the concept,the concept map can give play to its advantages and achieve good test results,but whether this score is likely to be affected by the test time or not will be discussed in the third experiment;at the same time,some researches show that learning effect of concept map+ retrieval practice is worse than retrieval practice alone because of the negative effect of concept maps.Therefore,under the condition that the students are proficient in the concept map,Experiment three aims to explore whether learning method of concept map + retrieval practice is better than the retrieval practice alone,and whether the time interval has an effect on the test score.The results show that:(1)Under the condition that students only receive 50 minutes of concept maps training,there is no significant difference between drawing concept map and retrieval practice in memory retention and transfer,and gender has no effect on learning;(2)On the premise that the students are proficient in the concept maps,the learning effect of drawing the concept maps regardless of the difficulty of the material is better than the retrieval practice in the retention and transfer of memory.(3)On the premise that the students are proficient in the concept maps,Whether it’s 24 hours test or a week apart test,the learning effect of drawing the concept map plus retrieval practice is better than retrieval practice alone.On the one hand,the conclusions of this research provide evidence for the cognitive interpretation of the concept maps learning effect,confirm the effectiveness of the basic principles of the concept maps,clarify the specific factors that affect the concept map learning effect,thus theoretically promoting the cognitive understanding of the concept map and meaningful learning;on the other hand,it optimizes the matching of educational environment and learning methods,which can promote the application of the two learning methods in different educational contexts;for teachers,it can not only guide them to create more effective teaching methods under specific teaching conditions,but also can help them grow faster on the path of professional development;for students of different groups,this research can help them find a suitable learning method and reduce the cost of trial and error.