Using concept maps for collaborative curriculum development

The curriculum represents the expression of educational ideas in practice. The word curriculum has its roots in the Latin word for track or race course. Today the definition is much wider and includes all the planned learning experiences of a school or educational institution. The purpose of this paper is to describe a study that implemented the construction of concept maps as a methodology to determine the degree of congruence among concepts. A curriculum map that represented the main concepts of the whole curriculum was developed by the project team to show the elements of a new curriculum for the medicine course of Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil. Concept mapping proved to be a useful evaluation tool. This "curriculum mapping" helped the group identify missing linkages, inconsistencies, false assumptions and previously unrecognized relationships. In this way, the curriculum is more transparent. Therefore, concept mapping has became an essential tool for the implementation of a curriculum.