Exploring student understanding of parallelism using concept maps

This work explores the conceptual understanding attained by students in the area of parallel computing. Parallelism is continuing to grow as an important topic area in computer engineering and computer science. Even as it increases in popularity, only a limited amount of research has been done to determine how well students construct their knowledge of the field. This work aims to begin exploring the structure of parallel computing as understood by undergraduate computer engineering students. A small group of students was selected to create concept maps that illustrate their understanding. These maps have been used in many different areas of science and engineering. The maps were then analyzed and compared to a reference concept map developed by a group of computer engineering faculty. The results of this analysis revealed that students in this sample demonstrated a limited knowledge of parallelism and concurrency through the organization of their concept maps. The analysis of the concept maps also provides evidence that there is a moderate level of understanding of the challenges to implementing and controlling concurrency. However, the linkages created in the maps reveal students´ misinterpretation of the goals of exploiting parallelism.