Concept Maps for Brainstorming

Concept Maps allow you to organize the terms that you come up with when you are brainstorming. For example, imagine you have to write a paper on the incidence of plagiarism among college students. Your concept map might start off looking something like this.

plagiarism

The first thing we want to do is think of synonyms for our main topic. Words and phrases like academic dishonesty, cheating and poor citing and paraphrasing would be good. We add them to the concept map.

plagiarism


academic
dishonesty


poor citing &
paraphrasing

cheating

The next term we want to think about is our secondary topic which is the college student population. We will want synonyms for this topic as well. We add them to the concept map.

college


university


higher
education

plagiarism


academic
dishonesty


poor citing &
paraphrasing

cheating

Next, we want to know the incidence, so we need statistics. How many students have been accused, punished or admit to plagiarism when surveyed anonymously. We add these terms to the concept map.


college


students
accused


university


higher
education


students
punished

plagiarism


students admit
when surveyed


academic
dishonesty


poor citing &
paraphrasing


cheating

Finally, we may also be interested in the causes, like student's feeling pressure to get good grades or being unethical. We add these terms to the concept map.


college



students
accused


university


higher
education

didn't know
they were
plagiarizing


students
punished


plagiarism

unethical

students
admit when
surveyed

academic
dishonesty

poor citing &
paraphrasing

pressure
to get
good grades


cheating


Now that we have completed our concept map, we can use it to create searches for online resources, like article databases or search engines.

(plagiarism OR cheating) AND (college OR university)

This search should find materials about plagiarism or cheating in colleges or universities.

plagiarism AND college AND survey

This search should find materials about surveys of plagiarism in colleges.

cheating AND university AND pressure

This search should find materials about cheating in universities and whether pressure is an issue.
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