Knowledge Maps and their application to student and faculty assessment

This paper discusses the development of knowledge maps for enhancing engineering learning. These maps are somewhat similar to concept maps, which have been widely used and developed in various areas of study. Knowledge maps, however, extend concept maps in that they not only illustrate the underlying concepts of a discipline, but they actually embed the knowledge in each of those concepts through various multimedia attachments. Knowledge maps also allow reverse mapping so that students can be assessed based upon how many concepts they know and whether they have understood the proper relationships between the concepts. A reverse map can be used to evaluate students and act as a record of student learning. Aggregate course maps may be used to gain an average understanding of the gains of entire classes of students and may be used to evaluate faculty effectiveness and provide valuable insight into the gains and weaknesses of students matriculating from one course to the next. The work contained herein presents the strategies implemented to allow for the design of custom knowledge maps. Reverse mapping techniques are discussed to indicate the method for evaluation of students.