Mind Mapping for Studying: When It Helps

What is a mind map?

A mind map puts one topic in the center of a page and radiates the main ideas out from it as branches, each splitting into smaller branches of keywords, examples and details. The format was popularized by the British author Tony Buzan in the 1970s, and it is often drawn with color and small images to make each branch distinct.

It is one member of a family of diagrams that are easy to confuse. A concept map, associated with the educational researcher Joseph Novak, joins ideas with arrows that carry a label, such as “causes” or “is a type of,” and allows many connections across the page. An outline arranges the same material as an indented list. Each suits different material, and choosing the right one is half the skill.

Mind map, concept map, outline or flowchart?

Before you start drawing, ask what shape the material has. Ideas that hang off one central theme suit a mind map. Ideas that influence each other in several directions suit a concept map. A sequence of steps suits a flowchart, and a long linear argument often suits a plain outline or Cornell-style notes.

When mind mapping helps

Mind mapping earns its time in a handful of specific situations. What they share is that the map makes you organize or retrieve something, rather than simply record it.

• Blank-page review: drawing everything you remember about a topic, then checking it, is retrieval practice in visual form.
• Getting an overview before detailed reading: a rough skeleton of a chapter's headings gives later details somewhere to attach.
• Connecting a whole course: one map with each unit as a branch exposes links that chapter-by-chapter study hides.
• Planning essays and exam answers: a quick map sorts points into groups before you commit to an order.
• Brainstorming: when you need breadth before structure, branches let ideas land anywhere without forcing a sequence.

When mind mapping is a waste of time

The most common use of mind maps is also the weakest: opening the textbook and transferring a chapter into branches, with extra time spent on colors and drawings. The map looks impressive, but the work was mostly transcription. You end up with notes in a different shape and no evidence that you can recall any of it.

Research supports that caution. In a well-known study, Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt found that students who practiced retrieving a text from memory learned it better than students who built concept maps of it with the text available, including on questions that required drawing inferences. The lesson is not that maps are useless but that the benefit comes from the remembering, not the drawing. Build the map from memory and it becomes a form of active recall.

Mind maps also suit some material badly. A chemical procedure or a proof is a sequence, which a flowchart or numbered list shows better. Dates, formulas and vocabulary are precise details that flashcards drill more efficiently.

How to make a mind map for studying

This method keeps the parts of mind mapping that help and drops the parts that only take time. A plain pen and a sheet of paper are enough; color is useful for marking what you missed, not for decoration.

Two checks keep a map honest. First, every main branch should be the same kind of thing, such as all stages, all causes or all themes, so the structure means something. Second, if a branch has grown into a paragraph of text, that part of the topic belongs in your notes or on flashcards, and the map should hold only the keyword that points to it.

1. 1Write the topic in the center, ideally as a question such as “What controls the rate of photosynthesis?”
2. 2Close your notes and textbook before you add anything else.
3. 3Add the main branches from memory, usually three to seven big ideas.
4. 4Add smaller branches using keywords and short phrases rather than full sentences.
5. 5Draw arrows between branches that affect each other, and write the relationship on each arrow.
6. 6Open your notes and add everything you missed or got wrong in a second color.
7. 7Turn each second-color item into a question to answer next time.
8. 8A few days later, redraw the map from a blank page and compare it with the first version.

A worked example: mind mapping photosynthesis

Put “photosynthesis” in the center. A first branch covers inputs: light energy, water and carbon dioxide. A second covers location: chloroplasts, with the light-dependent reactions on the thylakoid membranes and the Calvin cycle in the stroma. A third covers the light-dependent reactions, which split water, release oxygen, and produce ATP and NADPH.

A fourth branch covers the Calvin cycle, which uses that ATP and NADPH to fix carbon dioxide into sugar. A fifth lists limiting factors: light intensity, carbon dioxide concentration and temperature. Now add the cross-links that make the map worth drawing: an arrow from the third branch to the fourth labeled “supplies ATP and NADPH to,” and one out to cellular respiration labeled “products of one are inputs of the other.” Those labeled arrows are what typical exam questions probe. You can find full courses in the biology catalogue.

Then check the map against your notes. Suppose you wrote that the oxygen released comes from carbon dioxide; your notes say it comes from water. That correction goes on in your second color, and it becomes a question for next time: “Where does the oxygen released in photosynthesis come from?” One map, checked this way, produces a short list of exactly the things you did not know.

Using mind mapping for review and exam answers

Once you treat mind mapping as a recall and planning tool, it fits naturally into exam preparation in three ways.