An integrated concept mapping and image recognition approach to improving students' scientific inquiry course performance

Scholars and researchers generally believe that scientific inquiry is an important activity for cultivating students' applied knowledge and high-level thinking ability. The process of scientific inquiry can promote students' learning motivation and trigger their higher-order thinking ability. However, students may not have enough prior knowledge or they may lack inquiry experience, which may influence the effectiveness of their inquiry learning. Besides, in a scientific inquiry environment assisted by technology, students must face abundant and diverse learning resources, and may not effectively organize and carry out advanced cogitation to solve problems. Therefore, this research proposed an integrated concept mapping and image recognition (IR) approach to help students effectively acquire and organize knowledge in the process of scientific inquiry. This study applied a quasi-experimental design to verify the effect of this proposed approach. The experimental group conducted the concept mapping-based IR (CM-IR) learning approach, whilst the control group conducted the conventional IR-based learning approach to evaluate the students' performance in terms of their learning motivation and learning achievements. The participants were two classes of 10th-grade students in northern Taiwan. One was the experimental group with 22 students, whilst the other was the control group with 22 students. The experimental results show that the students learning with the CM-IR learning approach had better learning achievement, attitudes and intrinsic motivation, as well as higher mental load than those learning with the conventional IR-based learning approach. Accordingly, several suggestions are provided for future research in this field.