A COMPUTER ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR CONCEPT MAPPING 

ABSTRACT

Current educational theories emphasize assessment as a vital part of teaching-learning process. Alternative assessment techniques aim to expose and promote the process of the learning rather than the final outcome. Concept mapping is a technique for representing conceptual knowledge and relationships between concepts in a graphical form. Requiring to construct concept maps encourages learners to organize concepts and the relationships between them in a hierarchical structure. Although constructing concept maps might be difficult in every domain including mathematics and might require extensive domain knowledge, it is essential to employ concept mapping technique in order to reveal learner’s conceptual understanding. Hence, asking learners construct their concept maps or to fill missing parts in a pre-designed concept maps might be used as a part of the assessment process. A prototype computer system, called Concept Map Assessor (CMA), is designed to help learners to construct concept maps and to evaluate their performances in pre-designed concept maps. In this study, the basic features and elements of the CMA will be presented and its possible contributions to mathematics education will be discussed.