Students' Perception on the Use of Digital Mind Map to Stimulate Creativity and Critical Thinking in ESL Writing Course

In practise, mind maps have long been used by individuals especially teachers to create, visualise, arrange, and expand ideas in order to facilitate teaching and learning. Learning visually is a distinctive technique in modern pedagogy because most individuals are visual learners. As technology advances, digital mind map is created to replace manual mind map to bring modern pedagogy into the era of the fourth industrial revolution. Digital mind map has been used by teachers to teach diverse subjects. However, the use of digital mind map in teaching writing is scarce. Hence, the purpose of this case study was to examine the use of digital mind map to stimulate creativity and critical thinking in ESL writing course. A sample of 32 university students was selected randomly from one public university in Malaysia. The researchers developed a set of questionnaires to measure the three constructs – the usage of digital mind map, creativity, and critical thinking in writing tasks based on these three models: Lin & Faste, William, and Watson-Glaser models. The empirical results showed that the use of digital mind map evidently stimulates the students' creativity and critical thinking in completing their writing tasks as perceived by the respondents. Thus, the use of digital mind map has facilitated the ESL students' writing tasks in terms of integrating creative and critical elements.