Does the Use of Concept Maps Affect the Defining and the Understanding of Inclusion Relationships?

The current study aimed to investigate whether teaching ninth-grade students geometrical concepts using concept maps might affect their ability to identify inclusion relationships between geometrical concepts and/or their ability to define those concepts. Participants completed a pretest on the topic of quadrilaterals (inclusion relationships and definition of shapes). Then, the participants began to study that unit in a way that included the construction of the conceptual map of the quadrilaterals. Students worked in pairs and audio recordings were made of some pairs of students. After these lessons, the researchers administered a posttest and then analyzed the students' answers. Using the concept maps as teaching approach reveals potential improvement in two related aspects: students' ability to identify inclusion relationships between several quadrilaterals, and the accuracy of the students' definitions of geometrical concepts and the type of definitions that they offered.