What instructional strategy helps students learn through making connections between new and existing knowledge?

Concept mapping is an instructional strategy that visually represents relationships among concepts, enabling students to see how new information connects to what they already know. This strategy promotes deeper understanding by allowing learners to organize information hierarchically and meaningfully, thereby facilitating the integration of new knowledge into their existing cognitive frameworks.

By creating a concept map, students actively engage in the learning process, identifying key ideas and linking them in a way that demonstrates their understanding of the relationships between different pieces of information. This visual representation not only helps in retaining the material but also aids in critical thinking as students analyze and synthesize the knowledge they are learning.

Other instructional strategies, while beneficial in different contexts, do not primarily focus on making connections in the same way. Direct instruction typically involves teacher-led lessons with less emphasis on the student's prior knowledge integration. Collaborative learning emphasizes working with peers but does not inherently involve the structured organization of connections. Experiential learning centers on gaining knowledge through experience rather than through explicitly mapping out theoretical connections.