The Study of the Learning Effect of Concept Map Teaching and Cognitive Styles on Vocational Students’ Chinese Applied Essay Writting

• Main Authors: Pe-yu Lai, 賴倍玉
• Other Authors: Wei-Te Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/43146119013668399684

碩士 === 雲林科技大學 === 技術及職業教育研究所碩士班 === 98 === Education is the foundation of a nation, a long-term continuous endeavor. Hundreds of years back in Chinese history, our fore-teacher, Confucius proclaimed the most influential teaching philosophy, that is, general education, teaching without consideration of the students’ social status and teaching according to the students’ ability. With that philosophy in mind, teaching based on the students’ individuality has become the mission of every teacher. This thesis focuses on the study of how concept map teaching strategy and the traditional teaching affect vocational high school students of different cognitive styles and different learning styles in their learning of Chinese applied essay writing. The quasi-experiment method is adopted in this study, through the pretest-posttest nonequivalent-groups design, with six weeks of teaching time, using two classes of 11th grade vocational high school students as study subjects. The experimental group of 41 students is given Concept Map teaching, while the control group of 40 students is given traditional teaching. The research instruments applied included unit concept map teaching materials, unit achievement test, unit learning check-off list, Embedded Figure Test, Kolb Learning Style Inventory. The collected data were analyzed by using the following statistical methods: descriptive statistic, one way and two-way analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and t-test, and a further analysis and discussion based on the experiments is brought forth in the end. The research results are as follows: 1. After six weeks of the Concept Map teaching to both groups, the learning effects on the experimental group does not differ greatly from the control group. However, the learning effects of male students are greater than those of female ones. 2. The cognitive styles of vocational high school students are mostly field independent. Between experimental and control groups, there is no significant interaction between teaching strategies and cognitive styles of students and neither can we see the difference between groups belonging to field dependence and field independence. 3. As to the learning styles, assimulators take the most portion of the students, the second most prominent group is accomodators, the third one is divergers, and the least number of group is convergers. The teaching strategies and learning styles interact prominently, especially the two groups divergers and convergers. Within the two groups, the influence on control group is greater than that on experimental one. 4. Overall, the experimental group, instructed with the teaching strategy of Concept Map, performs better than the control group, instructed with the traditional teaching. The interaction between two teaching strategies and differing variants, such as gender differences, cognitive styles, and learning styles, is not statistically significant. 5. Compare with traditional teaching, the teaching strategy of Concept Map enhances the students’ writing form, integral thinking, fluency, accuracy and overal writing structures. 6. Within the experimental group, three factors, genders, cognitive styles and learning styles, does not interact with concept map drawing. The average score in students’ concept map drawing reach over thiry-five points The conclusion of the study suggests that students’ learning effects will surely be promoted and the teaching flow will be smoother in the further research adopting the teaching strategy of the concept map in the language instruction or the writing instruction with the careful preparation for the teaching material designing and the curriculum plan. The applied essay writing is not only a kind of language knowledge, but an essential skill in the work place. The vocational high school student must be skilled at it. The Chinese teachers in the vocational high school must value it more. It is expect