Abstract:

The present fast developing information society fundamentally influences both teaching and learning methods of the teachers and the students. The changes can be observed predominantly in the increasing quantity of information offered to learners who are consequently forced to devote a lot of time to reflection, classification and selection of available learning material. We are aware of the need to analyse our learning techniques, reveal and define optimal ways of learning which reflect the needs of a modern information society. An Internet phenomenon by its huge information potential changes radically the way of teaching and learning. We are often the witnesses of the fact that university students have not got adequate study habits – they do not know how to learn, they miss the ability to manage their own learning process in a constructive and goal-directed way. They acquire and master knowledge only chaotically and non systematically and do not coherently and consciously follow their study aims.

We think, a substantial competence of a present student is his/her ability of metacognition, ability to monitor, revise and check his/her own learning and cognitive processes. To know how to learn is the most important.

In this paper we hint at the possibilities of formation of metacognitive learning strategies in the first levels of the technical universities. One of them is the application of mind mapping – implementation of the think, conceptual and cognitive maps into the teaching process.

A pedagogical experiment, whose results are stated in this article, was realized during the academic year 2017/2018 on the University of Žilina in Slovakia. It consisted in the inclusion of mind maps into mathematics teaching, observation of their influence on the development of the metacognitive learning strategies’ formation and enhancement of the teaching process efficiency.

The results of the described pedagogical experiment convinced us about the positive influence of implementing the mind maps in the process of teaching. The students perceived positively especially the fact that mind maps enabled them to bring a system into the amount of information, facts and terms and receive a detached view of the studied topic.

The students of the experimental group achieved better the academic performance than the students of the control group.

Keywords:

Mental maps, metacognitive learning strategies, pedagogical experiment, method SQ4R.