A Tool Supporting Concept Map - Evaluation and Scoring

Concept maps are a form of graphical knowledge representation [1]. Concept maps are drawn as directed or undirected graphs. Concept maps may carry a large and complex structure where concepts are described as a form of relationships between the nodes and the edges. Concept maps are widely used in teaching and learning where educational research and assessment are necessary functions. The common problem when dealing with concept maps is evaluation. This usually involves comparing concept maps for similarity. When developing a concept map the developer uses different ways and terminologies to describe the same concepts and relationships. Furthermore there is no commonly accepted way of scoring a concept map since not all scoring rules are suitable for all types of concept maps. This thesis proposes a tool that reviews scoring techniques used for assessing the concept maps. A tool was developed to unify the terminology used in describing the concept and relationship in a concept map. The tool maps these terminologies into a common language and further scores it against a map master map. The tool also assesses concept maps based on different approaches of relational and structural scoring techniques as structure based scoring has shown better comprehension than scores based on concepts alone [9]. The tool produces the final score by summing up the scores of all these approaches. The tool is also user supported and is automated by the input prepositions given from the user. The results suggest that the evaluation techniques used by the tool helps in assessing the concept map but the tool does not support all forms of concept maps. The tool shows that it can accommodate various aspects of scoring and has shown capacity to integrate with other tools like the word net and implement algorithms such as path finder. However the tool needs to be further extended to support assessment of hand written concept maps and other scoring schemes