Effects of Vee Diagram and Concept Mapping on the Achievement of Students in Chemistry

This paper presents on the results of an experiment that compared the effectiveness of the use of Vee Diagrams against that of Concept Maps in learning chemistry concepts. It followed a quasi-experimental and a non-equivalent comparison group approach. The experiment involved two classes of third-year students of Liceo de Cagayan University High School in Cagayan de Oro City during the school year 2009-2010. Before the intervention, two similar tests were prepared, the pretest (PRT) and the posttest (POT). The t-test and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) were used to analyze the delta between the PRT and POT. The POT result shows that there is no significant difference in students’ achievement between these two approaches: Vee Diagrams and Concept Maps. Evidently, both helps students develop a rich system of concepts and their learning strategies that stimulate learners not only to use concepts that have already internalized but also to build conceptual interconnections. The conceptual interconnections that help students formulate theoretical explanations about observed changes. Teachers should stimulate students to integrate knowledge from the various scientific disciplines.
The findings point to the importance of emphasizing connections between concepts in high-school Chemistry instruction.

Keywords - vee diagram, concept mapping, achievement in chemistry