Measuring students’ information skills through concept mapping

Abstract

This paper seeks to develop a methodology that will discover, specify and measure students' abilities and skills in creating concept maps. Because competencies are the key factor in higher education, the paper analyses the role of concept maps as a tool to diagnose and improve information analysis, synthesis, organisation and representation skills and competencies. We propose a methodology that enables these skills to be evaluated by observing, analysing and measuring the stages involved in creating a concept map: identification of the main and secondary subjects; subject codification by concepts; grading of concepts; and representation of the concepts and their relationships with labels. A case study using action-research methodology tests the usefulness of the methodology on a group of university students of Library and Information Science. The method proposed provides information on the strengths and weaknesses of the students' skills analysed, thus enabling their training to be improved by means of specific actions.Keywords: Concept maps; Information organisation; Information literacy; Competencies; Skills. IntroductionInformation literacy (IL) entails learning the skills, competencies, knowledge and values to access, use and communicate information in any of its forms, in order to produce competent students and professionals trained in the routines of identifying, organising, evaluating and recording information sources appropriately and with the knowledge to process and produce their own information. Today, IL is inextricably associated with information practices and critical thinking in the information and communication technology environment [1]. The recent emergent importance of IL to the learning process is reflected in numerous publications [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].Webber and Johnston [10] define information literacy as "the adoption of appropriate information behaviour to identify, through whatever channel or medium, information well fitted to information needs, leading to wise and ethical use of information in society". Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning [11]. It is [15].Most of these standards refer to the domain of competencies related to the new ways of organising and representing information and propose observable indicators and outcomes.For example, Standard 4 of the ACRL [14] IL standards mentions the importance of tools for organising content such as schemas, diagrams, concept maps: "The information literate student applies new and prior information to the planning and creation of a particular product or performance". Our professional and educational experience in this field confirms that mastery of these content organisation tools contributes to raising students' levels of maturity, and provides teachers with information on the student's capacity to organise, represent and structure content by establishing internal links between content and conferring coherence. Concept mapsThe hierarchical ranking and sequencing of concepts in an integrating reticular space ...

Personal information management (PIM), reference management and mind maps: the way to creative librarians?

“…2) Brainstorming, idea generation and visual thinking. The literature cited here on PIM and mind maps for example bring to mind ideas for further research and teaching such as including argument maps in information literacy courses, evidence on the use of concept maps in information literacy training (in supplement to the article by Pinto, Doucet and Fernandez-Ramos, 2010), librarians' use of mind maps, success stories of using mind maps in libraries, systematic reviews of creativity and information seeking, the impact of visual thinking on research output, case studies of visualisation in teaching information literacy and PIM skills, action research in teaching information literacy and PIM skills, and the ability of mind mapping to show gaps in knowledge and to bring dormant information needs to the front. 3) Increasing productivity by creating outlines for projects and papers and saving time in writing out unnecessary words as is the case with note-taking.…”

Concept Mapping as a Tool to Develop and Measure Students’ Understanding in Science

“…Both expert and novice thinkers' schemata contained procedural knowledge; however, experts also thought about the applicability of procedural knowledge while novice thinkers' procedural knowledge lacked abstracted solution methods (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981). Several studies found evidence that expert students presented higher level of understanding, quality, and complexity (Austin & Shore, 1993), obtained higher scores for their categorization and representation of information (Pinto, Doucet, & Ramos, 2010), and discovered significant high correlations between the multistep problem solving performance and linkage, score, and good links (Austin & Shore, 1993) compared to novices. Experts also followed a qualitative procedure by using key variables linked together (Heyworth, 1999), used their prior conceptual knowledge and experience during the problem-solving process (Hmelo-Silver, Nagarajan, & Day, 2002), while novice students applied any available formula into which given data were substituted (Heyworth, 1999).…”

Significados e interpretaciones de la información desde el usuario

“…Estas actividades, que pueden ser grupales o individuales, incluyen, entre otras, la clasificación de tipos textuales, el uso del método Lasswell para (1985) para detectar la intención del autor, el método Sq5r (Thomas y Robinson, 1979) y el análisis de los marcadores textuales para detectar las ideas principales y el uso de esquemas para representar la relación entre ideas. Existen otras propuestas más específicas para reforzar el aprendizaje o mejorar alguna de las etapas del resumen, como por ejemplo la enseñanza basada en ejemplos de resúmenes profesionales (Ondrusek y otros, 2014), el uso de mapas conceptuales para organizar ideas y conceptos (Pinto, Doucet, y Fernández-Ramos, 2010) o ejercicios de paráfrasis para sintetizar las ideas principales de un documento (Bronshteyn y Baladad, 2006). La síntesis de información proveniente de diferentes documentos también es una tarea compleja y difícil de explicar, que no suele incluirse en los programas de ai.…”