Higher education increasingly encourages teaching approaches that promote student engagement and deeper understanding of course content. In business schools, instructors are often challenged to design learning activities that help students not only remember theoretical concepts but also organize and connect them in a meaningful way. In this perspective, active learning strategies can play an important role in supporting students’ cognitive development. Bloom’s taxonomy provides a useful framework to understand how different learning activities can stimulate several levels of thinking, from remembering and understanding to analyzing relationships between concepts.

This paper presents the use of mind mapping as an active learning and formative assessment tool implemented with a group of 40 first-year students in a marketing course at HESTIM Business School in Morocco. The activity was introduced at the beginning of a class session to assess students’ understanding of the concepts discussed during the previous lecture. Students were asked to create a mind map illustrating the main ideas of the course and the connections between these notions.

Through this exercise, students were encouraged to recall previously learned concepts, demonstrate their understanding, and analyze how different marketing notions are related. Classroom observations showed that the activity helped students structure their knowledge more clearly and enabled the instructor to identify possible misunderstandings. The exercise also encouraged participation and interaction among students.

These observations highlight the value of mind mapping as a simple yet effective tool to support active learning and formative assessment in business education.