Integration of Learning Through the Use of Self-constructed Diagrams: Opportunities and Challenges

The integration of what has been learned so that they become coherent is crucial for learning to become genuinely useful. Despite this importance, integration of learning (IOL) is not usually explicitly taught in formal education. Previous studies have examined various methods to facilitate IOL, and one method shown to be effective is the provision of diagrams to use. However, the usefulness of asking students to create their own diagrams to integrate what they have learned appears not to have been examined yet. That is therefore what we set out to explore in this study. We asked university undergraduate students to create a diagram to explain a process that required integration of information that had been covered in their course. The diagrams that 25 of the students produced were all variations of a flow chart, indicating that they were able to select the most appropriate kind of diagram for representing a process. However, the students varied in the quality of their representation of crucial components of the process, including connections between and within those components. Our findings suggest that constructing diagrams for IOL can serve useful learning diagnostic functions, and that it would be helpful to provide some instruction or guidance to some students so that they can effectively construct their own diagrams for IOL.