Concept mapping and synthesizers: instructional strategies for encoding and recalling.

The process of knowledge acquisition requires that nursing students obtain concepts which must be encoded, stored, and later recalled from long-term memory. To assist students with these processes, teaching strategies that structure content should be used throughout the curriculum. This article describes how the instructional strategies of concept mapping and synthesizers were used to facilitate nursing students' encoding and recalling of pharmacology concepts in an undergraduate pharmacology course.