The effect of concept maps in teaching human anatomy and kinesiology course on academic achievement and learning persistence of students

Although teacher-centered teaching methods and techniques are used in terms of usefulness and time saving, current studies have revealed that teaching methods and techniques in which the student is not active do not increase the academic achievement of the students or increase them at a low level. Since the subjects of the Human Anatomy and Kinesiology course contain many abstract concepts and words of Latin origin, it is difficult to understand, keep in mind, and recall the information about the course from long-term memory. For this reason, it is thought that students' structuring of existing information in their minds, associating newly learned information with old information, associating between concepts from long-term memory to short-term memory, will help them learn the course topics easily and increase their academic success. In our study, the research group consisted of 36 students in total, 19 of whom were experimental and 17 were control. While the traditional teaching method was applied to the control group, the concept map supported teaching method was applied to the experimental group. An achievement test was used to collect the necessary data in the scientific and numerical analysis of the research problem and to reveal the effect of concept maps in the teaching of the Human Anatomy and Kinesiology course on the academic achievement and learning retention of the students. While there was a significant difference between the Mann-Whitney U test analysis results applied to the pre-test results of the experimental and control groups (p<0.05), there was no significant difference between the post-test results (p>0.05). As a result of the Friedman test applied to the pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test scores of the experimental and control groups, a significant difference was found in both groups (p<0.05). The results of the pretest-posttest and pretest-delayed posttest Quade's ANCOVA test between the experimental and control groups gave similar results and no significant difference was found (p>0.05). These results show us that the methods applied to both groups increased the academic achievement and positively affected the exam scores of the students; It gives the result that both methods can be used for Human Anatomy and Kinesiology course. While there was a significant difference between the Wilcoxon test results applied to the test results of the control group (p<0.05), there was no significant difference between the Wilcoxon test results applied to the test results of the experimental group, only the delayed posttest-posttest results (p>0.05). This result gives us the result that the concept map supported teaching method has an effect on learning permanence, prevents students from forgetting the information they have learned quickly, and that the words and concepts related to the course are remembered.