ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1604406
This article is part of the Research TopicImmunology Education: In the Classroom and BeyondView all 4 articles
Collaborative concept mapping in Team-Based Learning: synthesizing complex immunology concepts in medical education
Provisionally accepted
- 1Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, Rochester, Michigan, United States
- 2Oakland University, Rochester, United States
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Teaching immunology to first-year medical students is challenging due to the complexity of the immune system's interactions with pathogens and other organ systems. One solution is to integrate immunology with different topics. To address this challenge, we developed a modified team-based learning (TBL) session that incorporated collaborative concept mapping to assess students' understanding of core immunology and microbiology concepts in a course focused on foundational science concepts for a clinical practice course. Three cohorts of first-year medical students (n = 375) participated in a collaborative concept mapping team-based learning activity (CCM-TBL). Students successfully integrated multiple concepts, with a mode of 5 concepts per map. A survey of the perceptions of 130 students showed that most found CCM-TBL helped them identify weaknesses in immunology (76%) and microbiology (66.4%), and improved their understanding of immunology (76%), microbiology (70.6%), opportunistic infections (65.5%), and interactions between innate and adaptive immune responses (64.2%). However, only 57.8% endorsed concept maps as suitable for a TBL. After implementing feedback-based improvements, more students reported that the activity increased their understanding of immunology (p = 0.018) and microbiology (p = 0.032).
Keywords: concept mapping, immune response, HIV, team-based learning, integration
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 09 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Baxa, Taylor, Cortes and Kemp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kyeorda Kemp, Oakland University, Rochester, United States
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