Novel principles of innovative education demand the necessity of integrating a knowledge that tends to be widespread and diverse. Also, it is necessary to select for the kind of contents that the students should know during their University formation, especially in health professions. Furthermore, current pedagogic tendencies consider that the student should be the protagonist of his own learning process.
Development of concept maps by J. Novak and its application to different areas of knowledge has opened new avenues for the integration of the three demands described above. Although concept maps have been used in education of different sciences such as linguistics, administration, history, computation, sociology, etc., its application to health sciences education has not been explored in deep.
This work analyzes the concept map as a tool for educational strategy as applied to dental histology. To do so, we first selected for a group of 80 undergraduate students of the Dental Science School at Granada University. Then, students were instructed in concept maps technique and asked to elaborate a concept map related to cell and tissue biology at the beginning and at the end of the academic year. The objective of the concept map was to correlate cell structural elements and functions which were previously known by the students. After using concept maps as a regular tool during the academic year, we evaluated the usefulness of this tool as an instrument for the integration of knowledge, capability for selection and participation of the students in their own learning process by comparing the results of the concept maps at the beginning and at the end of the academic year using the exact test of Fisher.
Our results show statistically significant differences when the following capacities and abilities of the students were analyzed: capacity to establish relationships among all the elements (8% accuracy at the beginning and 22.45% at the end of the academic year; p=0.009), capability to cluster different elements in groups (12% vs. 44.9%; p<0.001). Interestingly, students at the end of the academic year did not establish senseless relationships between the different elements (0%), while a small percentage of the students (5.33%) used this type of relationships at the beginning of the academic year (p=0.05).
These results suggest that the use of concept maps in health sciences, especially in dental histology, could contribute to an improvement of the capability of the students to integrate structural and functional concepts and elements used in histology. Furthermore, this kind of activity could be of usefulness as a training of the students in the context of their formation as future clinicians in areas in which they will have to integrate several concepts and elements from different areas such as pathology, pharmacology, psychology, surgery, etc.