My first reaction to concept maps was strong dislike, and further thought has not improved my opinion. I suspect my dislike is due to concept maps’ lack of structure, with the edges and vertices having no consistent meaning. I hypothesize that:
Any information conveyed by a concept map can be better conveyed by a more structured diagram.
We’ll see if that’s the case for actual concept maps people come up with. Hopefully someone will prove me wrong. Skimming “How Learning Works” I saw no concept maps used, but rather other forms of diagrams to summarize information. The one actual concept map is in the appendix on concept maps, taken from the primary source cited on the subject, and it’s confusing and over-complicated.
As a result, I see no reason to ever show a concept map to a student given that there will be a better way of representing the information. Nor would I want to ask students to make them. I’d rather give them a structure (e.g. a table of comparison or a flow chart) which will help guide their understanding. For my own personal use it also seems pointless, given I can come up with better context-specific structures to organize my thoughts.