#concept maps

PIDP 3100 , Week 6 , Blog Post 3

For : Karen Brooke, Vancouver Community College

Submitted by : Deepa Bhatia Dhingra 

Date : 13th July 2025

This blog is intended to describe aspects of Trends in Adult Education as discussed with my PIDP learning partner Evelyne Copeland. 

Evelyne, Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Executive MBA, shared insights based upon her seven years of instruction in Biology and Business to young adults in the College of the North Atlantic / Memorial University transfer program at two NL campuses.

She mentioned about some of the challenges confronted by adult educators in the aftermath of Covid, like lack of motivation to academic success in their first year of PSE after high school. Due to secondary level education shortcomings and memory disturbance, students can become insufficiently ready for PSE, specifically in STEM studies. Such subtle teaching concerns are adding to frustration among learners and teachers. Another hindrance Evelyne discussed is the increasing dependence on AI. Positively it increases the research and writing skills of students but negatively, excessive dependence on AI is skipping the learning process. Teachers are having a tough time assessing genuine formative learning with this excessive use of AI. This is resulting in teachers having to develop more substantive assignments that cannot be completed by AI tools alone.

To combat the same, the teachers need to find engaging and synergistic teaching methods and course constructs which allow to address the challenges mentioned above. They need to move towards more applied and experiential learning to enhance student engagement and foster deep learning.

Some of the teaching strategies used by Evelyne are :

Concept Maps : They help students map and interconnect ideas visually, breaking down challenging material to understand and recall. This reduces cognitive load and supports working memory.

Scaffolded Assignments : Here assignments are broken down into smaller steps, with early guidance. This too helps students build confidence and learn more in-depth understanding of the concepts.

In her stream of teaching Life Sciences, Evelyne also applies Scenario-Based Learning . In this, real life situations are employed to lead students to apply theory to practice. Instead of reading or quizzing, students "enter" real-life cases, make decisions, and observe results just like in real life. This experiential learning fosters critical thinking, improves memory, offers immediate feedback and allows learners to learn from mistakes in a risk free environment. Learners love the choices and personalized paths it offers.

One of the challenges she mentioned while teaching Life Sciences is the heavy reading load, in which one of the popular concept of Micro-learning is not effective. Instead, she uses enquiry based learning wherein learners explore everyday situations, create hypotheses, formulate experiments, collect and analyse data, reflect on them and present findings. She took an example of a lesson where students are taught about proteins, enzymes, and DNA by creating interactive decision-based simulations. This help students make real time decisions, they see cause effect in biological processes, and it encourages them to understand how enzymes interact with DNA during replication and protein synthesis. Adding quizzes help her condenses content and keep students engaged. 

We also discussed the growing use of VR as an increasing trend which creates immersive environments that simulate real or imagined worlds. Such interactive experience significantly enhances learning and engagement.

While teaching Business, Evelyne uses example of Google company as case studies where students study significant management functions like planning, organising, leading, controlling and decision making. This renders the learning concept interesting, practical and tangible. 

She also put emphasis on the use of formative assessment along the way which should be  done fairly and fast to provide timely feedback to them.

We finally wrapped up the discussion with the ongoing concerns of adult educators - like limited time, students’ readiness, and difficulty assessing open-ended work in enquiry-based biology classes. Balancing curriculum demands with student-led exploration also demands new skills, approaches and fresh resources most of which are expensive, time consuming and obsolete in no time.

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by Miss. Sai Shri Ramamurthy "A Case Study on the Methods of Intervention in Inclusive Classrooms"

Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-4 | Issue-5 , August 2020,

URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd31884.pdf

Paper Url :https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/education/31884/a-case-study-on-the-methods-of-intervention-in-inclusive-classrooms/miss-sai-shri-ramamurthy

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