Abstract
Hierarchical concept mapping has been widely used to facilitate students’ learning in science education, but its application in social studies has been scarce. Disparity in the interest to use concept mapping within different disciplines may be due to the fact that soft knowledge, such as history, has a very different structure and definition of concepts than hard knowledge, such as physics. Therefore, different concept mapping strategies may be needed to reflect the nature of soft knowledge more appropriately. On the basis of the cognitive complexity theory, a 6W concept mapping approach was proposed to fill this need. Its impacts on students’ attitudes about learning and on their performance when performing concept mapping were each assessed in this study.