What Are Cognitive Maps And How To Use Them?
Cognitive maps are very useful to help children and adolescents improve their learning and memorization. The acquisition of knowledge does not happen spontaneously and randomly, but requires study and repetition through exercises and experiences in order to assimilate the concepts or topics of any subject.
Through cognitive maps, children can express their ideas and knowledge in order to favor the absorption of information in their cognitive schemes.
What are cognitive maps?
They are tools through which it is possible to assimilate and retain any information from a graphic representation of concepts and ideas. Diagrams, diagrams or sketches are often used for these representations.
One of their advantages is that they are modifiable, that is, once done, new ideas or concepts related to said cognitive map can always be added. In addition, if you interact frequently with it, you will hardly forget its content.
Characteristics of cognitive maps
In addition to being an effective resource for learning any subject or knowledge, cognitive maps have their own characteristics that we are going to see below:
- They are very useful for getting more concrete and precise meanings.
- They will be very beneficial to systematize school content, both at school and outside of it.
- They make it possible to make comparisons, differentiate, order, group and organize large amounts of information.
- It can also be used for teachers, to focus on the maps those most relevant concepts of the subject.
What are cognitive maps useful for?
Cognitive maps have great advantages and can be very useful to us, especially in four aspects.
Pedagogical strategy
Teachers or teachers can use the cognitive maps to organize and schedule the subjects or topics to be taught according to the academic curriculum.
Learning meanings
As it is a graphic tool, it will be a great strategy to improve and increase memory and recall management, thus simplifying self-evaluation.
Didactic resource
Cognitive maps are an extraordinary technique to organize the material or information necessary in the assessment processes that are often used by teachers and professors.
Evaluation method
It can be used as a tool to compare, analyze and assess the advantages and disadvantages of the evaluation processes that teachers use. Cognitive maps have a huge number of benefits and virtues for the learning process. In addition, they can be used by both students and teachers.
Types of cognitive maps
There are a wide variety of ways to make a cognitive map. We are going to see some of the most used.
Cognitive cloud map
It is made up of cloud shapes and, within these, is the information that you want to highlight. It starts with a main idea and, from this, the subtopics arise around it.
Sun-like cognitive maps
As its name indicates, the central figure looks like a sun, in which the main theme would be located and, from this, the ideas or concepts that are related to the theme would be around.
Common aspects map
In this type of map, two different parts are constituted, but united by a common area. This form of diagram is useful when we want to point out ideas that are common to two different themes.
Bad water or jellyfish cognitive map
This shape of the diagram is very similar to that of a jellyfish. In the upper area, the main topic or idea is located and below, some boxes are placed with the subtopics or subideas. Finally, the characteristics of these subtopics are put in the form of vertical lines.
Cycle map
This is basically a chronological or sequential structuring ; It ends up taking the form of a series or cycle, by the use of circles or arrows with the ideas that we want to highlight.
The circle at the top is the one that will have the main theme and the rest of the circles will have the other ideas or stages. It is very useful to understand a cycle or circuit.
In short, cognitive maps are techniques that are very useful for the teaching-learning process and can help our children to learn certain topics of some subjects that cost them more work.
Being in graphic form, it facilitates their retention and helps to keep ideas in mind in an organized way, since when taking an exam it will be much easier for them to evoke the contents that have been studied with the help of these cognitive maps .
