PROBLEMS AND ISSUES IN THE USE OF CONCEPT MAPS IN SCIENCE ASSESSMENT

The search for new, authentic science assessments of what students kno w and can do is well under way. This has unearthed measures of student s' hands-on performance in carrying out science investigations, and ha s been expanded to discover more or less direct measures of students' knowledge structures. One potential finding is concept mapping, the fo cus of this review. A concept map is a graph consisting of nodes repre senting concepts and labeled lines denoting the relation between a pai r of nodes. A student's concept map is interpreted as representing imp ortant aspects of the organization of concepts in his or her memory (c ognitive structure). In this article we characterize a concept map use d as an assessment tool as: (a) a task that elicits evidence bearing o n a student's knowledge structure in a domain, (b) a format for the st udent's response, and (c) a scoring system by which the student's conc ept map can be evaluated accurately and consistently. Based on this de finition, multiple concept-mapping techniques were found from the myri ad of task, response format, and scoring system variations identified in the literature. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the rel iability and validity of these variations. The review led us to arrive at the following conclusions: (a) an integrative working cognitive th eory is needed to begin to limit this variation in concept-mapping tec hniques for assessment purposes; (b) before concept maps are used for assessment and before map scores are reported to teachers, students, t he public, and policy makers, research needs to provide reliability an d validity information on the effect of different mapping techniques; and (c) research on students' facility in using concept maps, on train ing techniques, and on the effect on teaching is needed if concept map assessments are to be used in classrooms and in large-scale accountab ility systems.