Poster #28 - Order of Element Placement During Concept-Mapping: A Frugal Method to Assess Students' Understanding

• In Event: 79.052 - MTCC Poster Session 19
  In Poster Session: 79.052-2 - Educational Measurement, Psychometrics, and Assessment Poster Session

Abstract

Holistic assessment is a common challenge in pedagogical settings. Concept-mapping based assessments have been proposed as a possible solution to this problem, but tend to be difficult and effort-intensive to evaluate in practice. We are examining the possibility of deriving alternative measures from physical concept-mapping to perform low-cost, low-effort holistic assessment in low-resource developing economy classrooms. Our basic hypothesis is that externalizing students’ thinking process by means of having them manipulate physical concept-map elements provides observable insights into their mental representations, which in turn can be used both for assessment and remediation. We report findings from an experimental assessment of college students’ conceptual-understanding. The primary finding is a frugal assessment strategy predictive of students’ global comprehension of the subject matter.

Authors

• Anveshna Srivastava, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

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