Background: In scientific inquiry learning, students often have difficulties conducting hypothetical reasoning with multiple intertwined variables. Concept maps have a potential to facilitate complex thinking and reasoning. However, there is little investigation into the content of student-constructed concept maps and its association with inquiry…

Background: Creating concept maps can help students overcome challenges of accurate knowledge monitoring and thus foster learning. However, students' knowledge often contains gaps and misconceptions, even after concept map creation. Theoretically, students could benefit from additional support, but it is unclear whether this might also be the case…

We investigated whether and how prior knowledge activation improves learning outcomes for high school (less experienced learners) and university students (experienced learners) in a hypertext environment. Map coherence was defined as the extent to which relationships between the concepts in the map were made explicit. Therefore, we classified the…