Many students fail to integrate biological knowledge into larger conceptual frameworks. Although textbooks and lectures in general biology courses emphasize major concepts, when students respond to questions, they often appear to be randomly grasping at disconnected sound bites of biological knowledge. The knowledge they have accumulated does not seem to be connected with concepts in a manner that allows them to develop explanations of phenomena or to use their knowledge to support an argument. The consequences of this approach to science are a reduced ability to retain and apply scientific knowledge, often characterized as a decline in scientific literacy. In this article, the author tested the effectiveness of methods that may contribute to a solution to this crisis in science education. In this experiment, he evaluated the use of cooperative concept mapping to encourage students to incorporate biological information into larger conceptual models. Thus, the results of this study indicate that the processes associated with constructing concept maps in a cooperative learning format improves students' abilities to access information and use it to answer challenging questions. (Contains 4 figures.)