by Krista Kecskemety

While generating a concept map from a blank page can be a great activity in some courses, sometimes we need a quick activity with quick assessment and scoring capablilites. Fill-in Concept maps can be an example of one of those activities. At Ohio State we have large class sizes and are trying to cover a signficant amount of material in our 2 credit hour first-year engineering course. In order to meet these contraints, we introduced a fill-in concept map activitiy into the course to encourage students to reflect on the Entreprenurial Mindset and make connections between topics in a bounded activity. The video and paper below go into detail about our experience.

Course context: First-Year Engineering Course - Assignment was given at the end of the second semester design-based course. Throughout the course, students worked in teams of four on an open-ended EM focused design project.

Lessons Learned: The different scoring methods did not have statsistically significant differences between them. However there were postives and negatives with each method. The traditional scoring method was easier to implement but one wrong concept placement would have a cascading effect on the score. And the categorical scoring method, while allowing for additional information gathering about the connections of categories, occasionally resulted in an "incorrect" map scoring higher than a correct map.