Los Mapas Conceptuales como Estrategia que Permite Mejorar el Proceso de Enseñanza Aprendizaje de la Neuroanatomía

Abstract

The present study describes the implementation of conceptual maps as a pedagogical strategy that tends to transform the passive students into an active producer. The use of concept maps in groups encourages students to meaningful learning, increasing interest and attention in relevant concepts working in a cooperative way. The objective was to measure the improvement of academic performance of the student when implementing the strategy of conceptual maps as a pedagogical tool of students of morphophysiology II at the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) for teaching the functional anatomy of the nervous system. An analytic prospective with four transversal sections study was conducted in 130 students of medicine (II semesters of 2006) Bucaramanga, Santander at 2006, who attended the course morphophysiology II. For the first and the second section the students received master classes and for the third section the group was divided and the active method of concept maps was applied. The multiple corrected comparisons were made using the Bonferroni test (p< 0.05) when the ANOVA shows significant statistical differences. All student received master classes as a group. For other activities they were divided in 4 groups; A, B, C and D with 36, 40, 25 and 29 students respectively. It is important that at the third period the performance of the group was homogeneous, finding not difference between groups. An ANOVA for all students in comparison of the 4 periods showed significant differences (F3,387: 39,116, p<0,001) where the comparison with Bonferroni demonstrated that performance in the third period was significantly better than in the other periods. Using concept maps as an strategy for actively constructing knowledge by students confirms that the process of learning is active and was reflected in the improvement of their performance.