Concepts Connected: How Network Analysis Increases the Power of Concept Maps for Effective Learning and Assessment
Concept maps are an effective learning and formative assessment technique, but they are difficult to evaluate and analyze. The goal of this project is to develop a digital dashboard for visualization and analysis that allows lecturers to depict their students' concept maps and objectively evaluate them in a few simple steps via network analysis.
The project
In this project, we developed ConceptMappR, a digital dashboard, designed to support both students and lecturers in evaluating concept maps, even for large groups of students. Concept maps visualize concepts and their relationships similarly to mind maps, except that all relationships must be justified and there may be multiple central nodes. Concept mapping supports organizing knowledge and conceptual relationships. Thereby, concept mapping stimulates deep, constructive learning and simultaneously captures learners› knowledge and conceptions.
However, using concept maps is challenging for lecturers because, compared to other formative assessment methods, concept maps are difficult to interpret and time-consuming to analyse. Our dashboard addresses this by enabling the evaluation and assessment of concept maps through the implementation of network analysis methods. Among other aspects, it enables the visualization of important connections, the centrality of concepts, and differences between different knowledge networks. Network analyses also allow aggregating different concept maps to visualize the aggregated map of a whole group of students.
Implementation into teaching practice
At the time of proposing the project, we had already collected names of lecturers at ETH who incorporate concept mapping into their teaching. To construct the dashboard, we consulted experts in network analysis and didactics, and used knowledge from our own research on the topic. We endeavored to obtain and incorporate user feedback at an early stage and thus presented the first version of the dashboard to the lecturers. After implementing their feedback, we deployed the dashboard in four courses with lecturers from different disciplines, namely biology, educational sciences, computer science and physics over two semesters (HS 23, FS 24). We systematically collected feedback from students and lecturers to further develop the dashboard.
Concept mapping offers a wide range of possible applications in teaching, and in the abovementioned courses the implementation also differed: In physics, the lecturer used concept mapping to let students draw maps on different topics, and then aggregate all to identify shared concepts. In computer science, the lecturer used concept mapping to identify and present the concepts of chapters from a programming booklet. In biology, the lecturer used concept mapping as formative assessment by providing students a list of core concepts, which they needed to relate to each other and compare to an expert map. In educational sciences, the lecturers let the students present the method of concept mapping to their peers (pre-service teachers) as a formative assessment and knowledge constructing method. They used it to assess conceptual knowledge on various topics, and to compare the created maps to expert maps.
Lessons learned and further impacts
Our goals were twofold: 1) Identification of network indices that are tangible and clear for students and lecturers to interpret, and 2) Development of a dashboard for students and lecturers.
We met both goals. By first asking network researchers about possible indices, and by discussing potential indices among us and with the lecturers, we identified several useful indices. The dashboard allows the user to choose, for example, between three common centrality indices which are explained in the accompanying readme page. We also reached our second goal. The dashboard is a user-friendly, platform-independent, flexible, and accessible tool that is freely available: https://conceptmappr.vlab.ethz.ch/
In addition to the initial plan, our dashboard also allows drawing concept maps, enabling a seamless process of designing and analysing them without any additional software.
The dashboard and its impact on student learning were evaluated through a questionnaire. Among other items, the questionnaire included questions about the perceived effects on improving the understanding of one’s concept maps. On average, students gave a score of 70 out of 100 when asked if the dashboard helped them to understand their maps better.
As concept maps are a versatile tool for many scenarios, our dashboard is already applied in seminars, lectures, and the teacher-education programme at ETH. Whereas some lecturers use it to foster discussion among their students, others use it to create network visualizations, or to assess students’ knowledge.
It will be applied in further courses starting from the autumn semester 2024.
Authors
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Simona Daguati
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Bruno Rütsche
