Assessment: Concept Mapping

Rubric Measure

Score (0 or 1)

Comments

Authenticity
Representativeness
How well does the assessment
measures knowledge important
to the practice of the subject

Meaningfulness
How worthwhile is the task or
assessment is as part of the
learning process?

Cognitive Complexity
Does the assessment require higherorder thinking skills?

Content Coverage
Is the material adequately
addressed by the assessment?

Transparency
Is the task being assessed clear to
both the student and the teacher?

Fairness
Is the assessment unbiased towards
all students?

Concept mapping requires students to visually articulate the

connections between key terms and ideas. It will eventually be
necessary for them to verbally articulate these same connections
if they go on to practice science at a higher level so concept
mapping gives them a start at making connections between
ideas.
Concept mapping could be a very important task as part of
learning the hierarchical connections between things. As a
formative assessment, it would allow both students and
instructors to see where students are in understanding
connections. As a summative assessment, it requires more
explanation and thought on the part of both teacher and student.
Concept mapping requires significantly higher level thinking
skills than other assessments might. It requires students to
visualize as many of the interconnections between ideas and
equations that they know and understand. Once students with a
strong factual knowledge get started, they realize there are a lot
of connections.
The content coverage of concept mapping is dependent on
students recalling key terms themselves (factual memory). In
theory, a well-prepared student would adequately cover the
material within a unit.
Students struggled with understanding what was expected of
them and how they would be graded. This led some of them to
simply skip the question, or to just write words but make no
map.
The assessment does not favor any one student over another. It
is very visual, so students with higher literacy skills dont benefit
as in other assessment forms.

Assessment: Concept Mapping

Generalizability
Comparability
Does the assessment offer the same
conditions to all students?

Reproducibility
Is the assessment accurate and
consistent (do students perform
similarly on the assessment as on
previous ones or in line with their
previously demonstrated capacity)?

Transferability
Is the assessment relevant to future
tasks the student might be required
to perform?

Educational consequences
Does the assessment have a
positive, negative, or neutral impact
on learning and instruction?

Final Score

All students took the assessment under the same (or similar)
conditions. They had access to the same study materials and
lecture notes.
Surprisingly, some students who normally score well on
assessments either left the question blank, or made purely
hierarchical maps (which did not receive full credit). I am
unsure if this was because they just didnt know what was
expected, or because they genuinely hadnt learned the different
connections between core ideas yet.
Students are unlikely to need to be able to visualize the
connections they know and understand in the future. They might
need to verbalize them, but concept mapping as defined here is a
fairly specific task with little transferability to other disciplines.
As a tool to assist in learning the hierarchical connections
between core ideas, concept mapping does very well. Otherwise
it has little impact on learning or instruction.
Lots of potential as a formative assessment but would require
significant additional scaffolding and explanation to make a truly
valid summative assessment. The potential for measuring
conceptual understanding is clearly there, just needs refining.