3: Concept Mapping

Estimated time commitment: 45-60 minutes

During my first month of grad school, I attended a workshop that taught concept mapping. Simply put, this technique helps you organize your thoughts and research by connecting topics and sub-topics in a manner that ensures that they connect and address questions or gaps in research. In terms of time management, this can be done while sitting around when you have a few minutes and will help get the ideas flowing and organized. In academic writing, everything is connected and every concept is built on another concept. There must be a flow.

This is a bare bones version of what a Literature Review would look like completely written out. Disclaimer: It is not going to be complete. You will certainly think of topics to add later and that is OK.

This helped early on in my graduate program because it was a sheet of paper I could refer back to regularly to support thoughts and guide my research plan. Once I got the hang of it, I really did not need to complete this step and became confident enough to go straight to building my Literature Review topics.

In the photo examples, I started with the topic in the center (Changes and Challenges of the K-12 Teaching Field in Urban Education) and built outward.

Please comment and let us know how this works (or didn't work because we like honest feedback) for you!