The Effect of Mind-mapping on Students’ Descriptive Writing Skills with Particular Reference to Grade11 Students at Woreta Preparatory School

Abstract

Mind mapping, a popular international technique for visualizing the relationships among different concepts,
assists students in recognizing these connections using a meaningful radial display. Mind-mapping
plays an important role in simplifying the learning of English language in general and writing
skills in particular. However, the quality of writing entirely depends on the methodology chosen by the
teachers’ attitudes and uses of mind-mapping techniques. Though different scholars believe mind-mapping
has a power to strengthen the teaching learning process, still there is no enough practice in the
context of our schools. This study investigated the effect of mind-mapping on students’ descriptive
writing skills. It mainly followed quasi-experimental design with quantitative and qualitative methods.
The population of the study consisted of grade 11 students at Woreta Preparatory School comprising
100 students and two English teachers using systematic random and purposive sampling respectively.
The study resulted that there were statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the
experimental group and the control one in the post-achievement test appearing in favor of the experimental
group as the effect of mind mapping on students’ descriptive paragraph writing abilities at
(P=.000, which is < 0.05). Besides, the positive attitudes of English teachers reflected as mind-mapping
allows students to effectively process the descriptive paragraph writing. Mind mapping is one of the
techniques that immensely contribute to education by association that is brainstorming, summarizing,
note-taking, consolidating information, thinking through complex problems, presenting information and
retaining and recalling information. Thus, the finding of this study suggested that teachers should implement
the mind mapping techniques at all academic levels.