Measure Concept Mapping, Not Concept Maps: Procedural Analysis Elucidates Stages in Students’ Understanding of Biology Concepts

• In Event: Understanding and Measuring Academic Performance

Abstract

Concept-mapping is an important assessment tool, testing learners' abilities to meaningfully connect a set of concepts. While existing methods for scoring concept-maps estimate the quality of the final generated map, such static scoring fails to capture potentially important information about the processes that underpin map-construction. We modified the standard concept-mapping technique by asking participants to build maps using physically movable elements, thus allowing us to track individual events in the map-building process. Based on empirical results of this study, we propose a novel set of procedural analyses to assess students' concept-level uncertainty and accuracy. Empirical evaluation on a sample of undergraduate students making DNA-related concept-maps suggests that our methods afford access to previously unobservable stages in students' concept-learning.

Authors

• Anveshna Srivastava, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

• Nisheeth Srivastava, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

• Sanjay Chandrasekharan, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research