Dr. Melissa Gardner
School Librarian
Kenton Elementary School
Kenton County
 What
is a Concept Map?
 Why use Concept Maps?
 How do we create them?
 How can they be used in a school library?
A
CM is a graphic representation of
meaningful relationships between concepts
in the form of a proposition.
 CMs are usually structured hierarchically
 CMs are presented two dimensionally and
show relationships between concepts by
linking words
 Schema
Theory: there is not just one
absolute body of knowledge, rather we have
different knowledge networks that are
applied in different situations based on our
prior knowledge and experiences.
 We react to new knowledge by accretion
(adding to existing), tuning(modifies
existing), or restructuring (creates new)
 New
meaning develops as a result of
previously acquired understandings merging
and reorganizing with new information.
 Learners
are required to extract and attend
to important ideas…
 Think about how those ideas are related…
 And then organize the information into an
integrated structure
Each of us comes with different prior knowledge
and different experiences
 Graphic organizers give us a way to incorporate
our existing knowledge and experiences with
new knowledge (creating and adjusting our
schema)
 CMs help students visualize the relationships
between concepts and facilitate understanding
 Graphic organizers such as CMs may illustrate
the characteristics of a concept, serve as cues
for important content or as a reference for
arranging new concepts into themes and
patterns

 Serve
as scaffolds
 Should be geared toward the type of
information being learned
 Research shows that all graphic organizers
are not the same
 Inspiration
 pencil/pen
and paper
 Post-It Notes
 Concept
 Line
linking (directional)
 Proposition
 Links
 Usually hierarchical
 Teacher
vs. student created
 Demonstrating learning
 Pre-writing
 Assessment