This study identifies the variables in construction of concept maps and purposefully tests the instructional effects of concept mapping in facilitating student achievement when those identified variables are manipulated. Concept map development consists of three important elements: the concepts, propositions and its hierarchical structure. A total of 290 undergraduate students from an educational psychology and a statistics class at a large state university participated in the study, of which 270 completed the experimental process. This study used the learning material and the criterion tests, and collected 265 sets of data. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to test the instructional effects of the three concept mapping strategies with alpha level set at 0.05. MANOVA results from the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 11.5 on the achievement indicated that there were significant differences at the 0.05 level on the criterion tests among all treatment groups. Data analysis indicated that different concept mapping strategies have different effects in facilitating achievement of different educational objectives. (Contains 7 tables and 6 figures.)