Concept Maps as Assessments of Expertise: Understanding of the Complexity and Interrelationships of Concepts in Science

Abstract

Concept maps were created as one of six measures to identify exceptionally talented students during the Cultivating Diverse Talent in STEM (CDTIS) project, with the goal of identifying and nurturing talents in students from groups traditionally underrepresented in special programs. New methods were compared with conventional methods to select students for an internship in the laboratories of scientists. In this article, we describe development, field testing, and implementation of the concept map assessments in life and physical science. Assessments were field tested in partner schools with high percentages of American Indian (97% to 100%) and Hispanic (83%) low-income students. Students were selected by considering their performance on all six assessments and were placed in internships along with students selected using conventional methods. Concept maps were successful: (a) students from partner schools demonstrated high levels of domain-relevant skills; (b) scores approximated a normal distribution; (c) scores of students from culturally diverse, low-income groups were very similar to the scores of students selected using conventional methods even though many of conventionally identified students had high grade point averages and came from schools in high-income areas with many educational opportunities. Students completed original research and presented posters to the university community and their local communities. Concept maps can be used alone or in combination with other assessments; their use needs to be studied with larger groups of students and in other contexts.

Culturally Responsive Assessments of Spatial Analytical Skills and Abilities: Development, Field Testing, and Implementation

“…Overall results are provided in another publication (Maker, 2020). Descriptions of the new performance assessments used in the selection process for M2 students are provided in other publicatons: concept maps (Maker & Zimmerman, 2020), math (Bahar & Maker, 2020), life science performance assessment (Zimmerman et al, 2020), physical science performance assessment (Alfaiz et al, 2020). However, in this section the results of the spatial analytical and math assessments in each partner school are compared to demonstrate the utility of the assessment to identify exceptional talent in students from diverse cultural groups and low-income families (Table 2).…”

Culturally Responsive Assessment of Physical Science Skills and Abilities: Development, Field Testing, Implementation, and Results

“…The CDTIS Project was designed to identify and nurture exceptionally talented students in STEM. In this project, the education research team developed four new assessments: life science problem-solving (Zimmerman et al., 2020), life science and physical science concept maps (Maker & Zimmerman, 2020), and the mechanical–technical performance-based assessment. One assessment (mathematical problem-solving) was modified to include a greater variety of problems (Bahar & Maker, 2020), and one performance-based assessment from the existing DISCOVER high school battery, spatial analytical problem-solving (Maker, 2020a), was included in the set of instruments used to select students for a special internship program on the campus of an R1 university in the southwestern United States.…”

“…(Maker, 2020b, p. 21)In addition to the mechanical–technical performance-based assessment described in this article, three new assessments were developed, one existing assessment was modified, and one of the original DISCOVER assessments was included in the battery of instruments used to assess and identify students for a special internship program on the campus of an R1 University in the southwestern United States. Assessment of physical science ability included two parts: (a) concept maps (Maker & Zimmerman, 2020) to assess the first component of exceptional talent and (b) the performance-based assessment of creative problem-solving described in this article (mechanical–technical) to assess the second component of the definition of exceptional talent.…”

Empirical study on the effects of social network–supported group concept mapping

“…Concept map has been used to develop and evaluate student's knowledge structure via the four main components including propositions, hierarchy, cross-links, and examples (Maker & Zimmerman, 2020;Novak et al, 1984). The scoring criteria of concept map components has been applied in many studies for many purposes, for example, measuring students' understanding , assessing students' achievement level, and tracking the improvement of students' comprehension of concept relationships .…”

“…The scoring criteria of concept map components has been applied in many studies for many purposes, for example, measuring students' understanding , assessing students' achievement level, and tracking the improvement of students' comprehension of concept relationships . The scoring results can reveal how students organize concepts at different level of hierarchy, how many concepts students can demonstrate in a map of the domain, how students identify the relationships among concepts, and how many examples students can include to present their ideas (Maker & Zimmerman, 2020). Researchers have found that the scoring criteria (Novak et al, 1984) is convenient for quick scoring (Tan et al, 2017).…”