Scoring Concept Maps: An Integrated Rubric for Assessing Engineering Education

TLDR

The authors aimed to create and evaluate a rubric for scoring concept maps to assess students’ knowledge integration in engineering education. They collected concept maps from industrial engineering students in 2000 and 2002, scored them with both traditional counting metrics and a newly developed holistic approach, and used the latter’s attributes to design the rubric. The holistic rubric revealed progressive improvement across the program and highlighted curricular gaps, whereas traditional metrics offered quantitative data but raised doubts about their validity in reflecting true conceptual understanding.

Abstract

Abstract We investigated the use of concept maps to assess “knowledge integration,” by developing a rubric to “score” maps using two samples of students. In 2000, a sample of sophomore, junior and senior industrial engineering students was asked to develop concept maps of that field. This exercise was repeated in 2002 with seniors, half of whom participated as sophomores. The maps were scored using “traditional” counting metrics proposed by other researchers and with a holistic approach developed for the study. The holistic approach indicated that students improved as they matriculated through the program, and also enabled faculty to identify programmatic weaknesses. Although the “traditional” methods provided quantifiable information, closer examination questioned whether that information was representative of students' true conceptual understanding. Consequently, a scoring rubric was developed and tested using attributes of the holistic approach.