Valletta, Malta 2012 THE USE OF CONCEPT MAPS IN TEACHING COMPUTER SCIENCE

Abstract. Concept maps help visualizing the key concepts as well as summarizing the concepts and also their relevant relationships. Therefore the memorizing and remembering processes will be facilitated (Hatami, Mirzayee, Abbasy, 2009). According to the meaningful learning theory, interrelated sciences of a single academic major are organized in a pyramidal, imaginary design and hierarchical order, in which the cognitive structure provides the scientific grounds. The research design in this work is a semi-experimental design containing pretest and posttest. The sample is 81 bachelor's students of Computer Engineering whom were selected by purposive sampling. The outcome of this project indicates that the teaching based on the concept maps has positive influences on increasing the students ’ achievement and grades in the subject of the Distributed Systems