Making the reading material available lifted short-term scores but not what stuck two weeks later.
Reading comprehension is where a lot of students quietly fall behind. Concept mapping is one of the tools that helps, and the kit-build variant adds a wrinkle. Learners do not draw a map from scratch. They rebuild a fixed set of concepts and links taken from an expert map.
That raises a design question. If students are rebuilding a map, should they keep the reading material open? One view says yes, the text lets them check details. Another says no, because forcing them to rely on memory turns the activity into retrieval practice, which is good for retention.
The team tested this with 101 participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Everyone read a 2,701 word text about the Komodo dragon and took a comprehension test. Then they were split into three conditions.
Right after the activity, the Map and Text group did better than the Map only group, with a median normalized change of 0.45 against 0. That difference was significant. Two weeks later it had disappeared. On delayed retention, the two groups were not significantly different.
Reading time mattered more than access. Participants who spent longer with the text while building the map did better on both tests, and beat both control groups. The catch is that most participants barely read at all. Making the text available was not enough, on its own, to change the outcome for the group as a whole.
Furtado et al. (2021). Influence of Access to Reading Material during Concept Map Recomposition in Reading Comprehension and Retention. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems.
