Concept maps for engineering education: a cognitively motivated tool supporting varied assessment functions

TLDR

Assessment in education characterizes student knowledge and serves diverse purposes, from monitoring progress to evaluating expertise, and selecting appropriate tools is a central challenge. The paper aims to use concept maps for course‑ and program‑level assessment in engineering education. The authors review concept map theory and illustrate how they can be applied at both course and program levels.

Abstract

Assessment in the context of education is the process of characterizing what a student knows. The reasons to perform assessment are quite varied, ranging from a need to informally understand student learning progress in a course to a need to characterize student expertise in a subject. Finding an appropriate assessment tool is a central challenge in designing an assessment approach. The focus of this paper is on the use of concept maps for both course-level and program-level assessment in engineering education. Concept maps, which are node and arc representations of the relationships among concepts, provide one means to represent student knowledge. This paper presents background on concept maps and describes uses of concept maps at both the course and program level.