Concept Mapping in the Age of Deleuze: Fresh Perspectives and New Challenges

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The reviewed paper is theoretical in nature and not an original research paper with collected data and statistical analyses. The paper is settled in the context of higher education. The authors try to combine two alternative teaching methods, namely concept mapping and rhizomatics. Both learning techniques use visualizations of teaching topics with words, phrases or terminologies. The idea behind both learning techniques is to draw connections between different entities and make conclusions on various levels so that the learner gets a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of teaching materials. Viewed from a psychological perspective, this makes sense. The human memory is able to remember facts and materials even better when information is visualized (e.g., with movies or video games).

I really enjoyed reading this article and thank the authors for their fresh thoughts and new ideas presented in this interesting article. Improving students’ learning success is an important task and, of course, relevant for our whole society. Teachers in school and university settings should focus on sustainable learning techniques. Both concept mapping as well as rhizomatics seem to be interesting and promising teaching methods.

However, I missed a section with practical implications. I, in the role of a psychologist, statistician, and also lecturer, asked myself what to do now? Keep using concept mapping? If not, are rhizomatics an adequate alternative? Note, the authors want to combine both learning techniques (see Figure 1: “Putting together the language of the rhizome using the grammar of a concept map.”, page 5, line 148). But what is now the final consequence in order to improve students’ learning success?

Thus, I urge the authors to add an additional chapter with practical implications. Furthermore, I asked myself how to examine the authors’ statements with research methods. What are adequate research designs to study effect sizes of learning strategies that are combining concept mapping with rhizomatics? What would be an adequate control group? Perhaps teaching as usual with frontal instructions? I felt like the authors did not tell the full storyline. In a revised version of the manuscript, the authors should try to solve the riddle and tell the reader what to do now in teaching contexts. They should add an outlook on future research in this field (e.g., open research questions, possible study designs, and hypotheses of interest).

Besides this, I have some comments/suggestions that I hope will help the authors to further develop this line of work:

(1) The authors use a lot of literal quotes without quotation marks (e.g., page 2, lines 47 to 50, lines 57 to 61, lines 76 to 78, lines 89 to 93). Please use always quotation marks for literal quotes.

(2) The authors use in most headings a dot at the end of the heading except of the first heading “1. Introduction” (page 1, line 21). Please keep a consistent writing style. I would recommend not to use a dot in all headings.

Author Response

We thank this reviewer for the comments and have implemented all the suggestions:

This reviewer's main suggestion was that we add a chapter of practical implications. This has been added (lines 386 - 422). We agree this strengthens the paper.

The two minor points raised:

(1) The authors use a lot of literal quotes without quotation marks (e.g., page 2, lines 47 to 50, lines 57 to 61, lines 76 to 78, lines 89 to 93). Please use always quotation marks for literal quotes.

The larger quotes indicated by the reviewer are separated from the main text and indented. We believe this conforms to the house style of the journal and that quotation marks are not required in these instances. Where short quotes occur within the body of the text, then quotation marks have been used. 

(2) The authors use in most headings a dot at the end of the heading except of the first heading “1. Introduction” (page 1, line 21). Please keep a consistent writing style. I would recommend not to use a dot in all headings.

The dots have been removed from the end of the headings as requested.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a philosophical paper that has its aim to broaden the perspective on concept mapping and the use of concept mapping in a broader field of education via structural and conceptual analysis and comparison with the philosophical rhizomatic thinking of Deleuze. Moreover the new inputs are immediatly applied onto previous research. Overall, it worked out for me.

Chapter 5: contestations; maybe you can stregthen this section in being more clear in the beginning about the debate. If the reader does not know the debate beforehand it is difficult to get the point. One way could be to present first the study first, then the critique offered by others and finally the analysis from a rhizomatic and broadened concept map perspective. At the moment it is mixed up from the beginning and this confused me as a reader.

Every theoretical worldview has its strengths and weakneses, has explanatory power in some aspects. You start a very valuable discourse in linking two very different perspectives and rhizomatically the two worldviews are integrated. Elegant is the link with the morphology of a rhizome and the cross section. Maybe you can expand a little bit in how the metaphor helps you to think about the links and the result. It could be more convincing, maybe also with outlining the restrictions of the crosscut section metaphor applied to concept maps. Every heuristic tool derived from concrete pictures helps in thinking about abstract things, but at the same time restricts thinking again.

Overall I really liked your thoughts - very inspiring!

A further minor comment:

Please explain the abbreviation RCTs (in line 241 first time occurring).

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the comments and have responded to the comments:

Re: Chapter 5. We feel that the structure of this section is logical, starting with the description of the study, proceeding to the queries raised in the rebuttal paper before moving on to a consideration of feedback in the mapping process and ending with a reconceptualization using the rhizomatic lens. We have added a brief description of the key source of irritation for the rebuttal authors - lines 218-219 -  to add clarity to this key point.

Re: the minor query - Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) has been spelled out in full in line 235.

corrections are shown in red in the resubmitted manuscript. 

We hope this satisfies the reviewer's queries. 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I thank the authors for submitting a revised version of their manuscript entitled “Concept mapping in the age of Deleuze: Fresh perspectives and new challenges”.

Honestly, I think the authors did a great job! Adding a chapter with practical implications has increased the quality of the revised manuscript a lot in comparison to the first version. I really appreciate authors’ efforts and their ideas in the current version. Thank you!

The authors have responded to all my concerns adequately. I have no further comments. Overall, I am happy with the paper and I believe that this article will make a positive contribution to our field.