Untitled - South East Asian Journal of Medical Education

importance of the concepts and they areorganized into groups, branches, or areas.The uniform graphic formulation of thesemantic structure of information on themethod of gathering knowledge, may aidrecall of existing memories.Mind maps can be used as self-learningmethods, which enhance the focus onsalient rather than irrelevant aspects. Italso facilitates the achievement of aconceptual understanding of thefundamental principals of a huge amountof information and enables to assembleand integrate many concepts together.Mind maps promote active learning.Analysis of the data indicates that, as astrategy to improve memory for writteninformation, the mind map technique hasthe potential for an important improvementin efficacy (Farrand et al., 2002).Medical schools have been changing theireducational programs and teachingstrategies, at national and internationallevels, to ensure that students have activeresponsibility for their learning processand are prepared for life-long, self-directedlearning (West et al., 2002). The efforttoward developing active learning wasbased on the concern, expressed byexperienced medical educators, thatstudents memorized facts ("rote learning")instead of understanding and applyingconcepts ("meaningful learning")( Rendaset al., 2006). Unless there isunderstanding, students may only commitunassimilated data to short-term memoryand no meaningful learning will occur (All& Havens, 1997).The curriculum of the Faculty of Medicine,University of Colombo, Sri Lankaemphasises the need for self-directedlearning and deep learning. Therefore thestudy was performed not only to evaluatethe effectiveness of mind maps as a selflearning method, but also with theobjective of introducing this technique tothe new entrants to the faculty.ObjectiveEducational materials have recentlyemerged which aim to improve memory formedical information by representing factsin the form of “mind maps”. Our aim was toevaluate the effectiveness of using mindmaps as a self-learning method.MethodologyA total of seventy four students from thenew entrants to the Faculty of Medicine,Colombo were randomly selected toparticipate in the study. They wereassigned to two equal groups designatedthe mind map group and the self-selectedstudy technique group according to therank obtained at the university entranceexamination. There were only fourdropouts from any of the sessions.A text on “iron deficiency anaemia” wasselected from a recommended text bookas self study material. The topic of the textwas carefully chosen to minimize thepossibility of participants’ existingknowledge in the selected study materialfrom interfering with the results. Theinvestigators developed four structuredessay questions from the study text and allquestions were of a similar length andrequired the recall of a specific piece ofinformation presented in the text. Eachquestion reflected a similar level ofdifficulty.Initially the participants in the mind mapgroup were given a 30-minute lesson onthe mind map technique to train them onthe application of the method. The lessonused material totally unrelated to the studytext to demonstrate the best ways toproduce and memorize mind maps. Duringthe training the participants were given theopportunity to ask questions regarding thetechnique.Following this training both groups wereexposed to the selected study text on irondeficiencyanaemia for a 45-minute period.Participants in the mind map group wereadvised to divide the time between readingthe study text and producing a mind mapand studying it. Participants in the selfselectedstudy technique group wereadvised to divide their time betweenreading the text and applying their existingstudy methods. None of the participants inthe self-selected study technique groupused mind maps as their preferred methodof study. Following the study session allparticipants were again given 30 minutesto answer the questions. The perceptionregarding the technique was obtained fromthe mind map group using a selfadministeredquestionnaire.South East Asian Journal of Medical EducationInaugural issue31