A Comprehensive Methodology for Concept Map Assessment

Concept maps have been around for quite some time, and their principles are deeply rooted on well-known learning theories. When used in the evaluation process as a tool to assess learning they have obvious benefits by allowing students to externalize their own mental trees of assimilated concepts seamlessly. However, the assessment of concept maps includes a strong degree of subjectiveness, which should be mitigated. In this paper we propose partitioning the concept map evaluation process according to the steps followed for creating them, along with objective metrics to assign a score to each of these steps. We also propose a formula that combines the partial scores to obtain the final score. Afterward we validate the proposed methodology, showing that the score variability associated with the evaluator is reduced by up to 23%.