How to Create Nursing Concept Maps for Nursing Students

A concept map is a visual model that illustrates concepts and their relationships. This allows you to easily grasp the material by breaking down large topics into smaller pieces and understanding relationships between concepts. It aids in developing critical thinking skills like creating, analyzing, and evaluating. Thus, it is a perfect solution for nursing topics that need extra time and effort. Your studies may become easier by creating a nursing concept map. The following will show you how to create a concept map and the benefits it provides to nursing students.

The Effect of Concept Mapping in Studying Nursing

Professors at Purdue University saw the need for improvement in the critical thinking skills of undergraduate nursing students. As such, researchers, namely Janet Garwood, Azza Ahmed, and Sara McComb, thought of solutions to resolve the issue. They made use of PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines to conduct the study. Their study focuses on analyzing the effect of concept mapping on nursing education. And there were a total of 17 articles reviewed on the topic of a concept map, nursing education, and critical thinking. Results show that the concept map is a useful tool to promote high-level thinking skills and helps apply theory to practice. This was later on adapted by medical practitioners and thus the idea of using nursing school concept map was born.

Example of Concept Map for Nursing

This is an example of a nursing concept map for pneumonia. It depicts the most common pneumonia symptoms and treatment. The map comes after you have already determined the causes and identified the symptoms. You can also create your own concept map for nursing from the instructions below.

How to Create a Concept Map for Studying Nursing

Concept maps have become abundant visual and learning materials thanks to the advent of map making tools. There are many map makers that you can use which are and most of them are web-based. With that being said, GitMind is a perfect fit to the description above because it provides abundant templates, and other essential chart making functions for free. This program comes with premium features such as diversified templates, collaboration capability, unlimited maps for online users and so much more. So if you want to use this tool especially for making nursing concept map, follow the simple guide below.

• On your browser, visit the webpage of GitMind and click the “Get Started. It’s Free!” button.

• Replace the main theme with your concept map topic and add nodes using the “Floating node” option. Simply click the square icon at the top menu and click anywhere to add.

• Click the node and then press the tab key to insert sub-nodes. Next, fill out the branches of the nursing concept map for pneumonia with information and edit the map by adding icons or adjust styles. To save the project, click export, and select your desired format.

Conclusion

Studying to become a nurse is not an easy task. You need to be well-prepared to pass exams and be able to apply what you learned in the field by studying and understand nursing concepts. And findings proved that concept mapping can aid in developing higher-level thinking skills that are crucial for a nursing student. Hence, the nursing school concept map is a must for nursing education.