Use of the Concept Mapping Strategy to Improve Academic Writing

Abstract

Academic writing is considered a difficult activity for the majority of academics in Indonesia. Only a few Indonesian lecturers and researchers are able to publish their research papers in reputable international journals. Compared to other Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, Indonesia ranks last in terms of the number of papers published in reputable international journals. Indonesia has to solve this problem by conducting effective courses in academic writing. One of the approaches that may be used to create an effective writing course is a concept mapping learning strategy. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of using a concept map learning activity in an academic writing course to increase faculty writing ability. Participants in the course were open and distance learning graduate students enrolled in an academic writing tutorial program. The results of this research indicate that the concept map learning strategy applied to learning activities of academic writing helped the students find and construct the main topical ideas of their academic article. In addition, students showed increased motivation from using the concept map strategy in writing their academic paper projects