There is a growing awareness of the need for changes in nursing education systems, especially in developing self-learning techniques where the student is an active participant in the learning process. Nursing students are exposed to a vast amount of information and reading material that is very specific, technical, and new to the students, they need to able to link learned facts, concepts and principles with new knowledge in order to make sound rational decisions in practice. Concept mapping, a learning strategy used to understand key concepts and relationships between concepts, has been suggested as a method to plan and evaluate nursing care. The purposes for this study were to (1) Find out whether concept mapping improved students’ learning achievement in an advanced nursing courses within the nursing baccalaureate program; and Identify students’ attitudes towards using concept mapping as a learning tool. Method(s): One-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design used with senior-level baccalaureate students (n = 46) students from two classes enrolled in an advanced nursing course at taif - university in saudi Araba. Students completed questionnaires to self-evaluate their learning and report their satisfaction with concept mapping. Tools were constructed to collect the data, demographic questionnaire, End-of-Training-Concept of Mapping Usage Questionnaire, and End of Semester Concept Map Usage Questionnaire.
Results: The experimental data revealed two important results. First, adopting a concept mapping strategy can significantly improve students’ learning achievement compared to using a traditional teaching method. Second, most of the students were satisfied with using concept mapping in advanced nursing courses. Conclusions & Recommendations: This study supported concept mapping as an additional learning strategy and has extended knowledge in the nursing education and also enhance student interests in learning nursing. Student also thought that concept mapping could be usefully used in other curriculum areas. Further study is recommended to study the relationship between learning style preference and concept mapping as a teaching strategy.