Debate with Maps: A new Pedagogical Architecture

This Research to Practice Full Paper Presents Debate with Maps: A new pedagogical architecture based on meaningful learning. Group Work is a didactic that has the objective of promoting learning and that can be of diverse natures. One of the determining factors for its success is the applied composition strategy, which may or may not favor the construction of knowledge of different profiles of learners. On the other hand, the task of composing groups of learners based on their cognitive performance, without the use of a support tool, can be very time-consuming. Therefore, the Pedagogical Architectures then emerge as teaching-learning structures that are made of several components which have the function of facilitating the interactions in an environment of autonomous action and collaborative construction. Teaching strategies that provide the learner with situations of questioning and imbalance are recognized as effective for the construction of new knowledge. However, leaving the responsibility for provoking such situations only to the teachers, overloads them. Therefore, we propose the Debate of Maps as a new instantiation of Pedagogical Architectures that uses concept maps as form of representation and sharing of knowledge in place of discursive responses in the debate dynamics. A tool was designed and added to a concept mapping service platform. Two experiments were carried out in the classroom environment, allowing a deep analysis on the application of the PA and tool. The tool supported the activity as a whole, with positive feedback from both the teacher and learners, concluding that the final maps had their contents improved.