Utilizing Concept Maps to Improve Engineering Course Curriculum in Teaching Mechanics

Abstract

One of the most difficult tasks in teaching is evaluating how students assimilate the content; this holds at all levels of education. Tests and homework only show so much, as the performance on those evaluations may be a stronger indication of how much effort each student is putting into the course. In addition, large classes and the relative lack of communication between the instructor and his/her students make it difficult to know exactly how students are learning course material. One approach is to have students create concept maps once they have finished the course. A concept map is essentially a mental web of connected terms or topics, where the centermost term is the primary learning focus and lines are used to connect related concepts. This results in a web of interconnected concepts that reflect the way students assimilate the new information. The three main questions guiding the study reported here are: 1) How can we decode the variety of ideas and structures that students include in their concept maps? 2) How can we use discoveries from this decoding to make lectures and labs more effective? 3) What improvements can be made to the way students are assigned drawing concept maps to further increase the usefulness of concept maps in capturing their learning? The dataset for this study focuses on concept maps developed by undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory solid mechanics course taken by many prospective engineering majors (primarily freshmen and sophomores) in the winter quarter of 2013. In the final week of the course, students were tasked with creating a concept map of the various terms and topic areas covered during the ten-week course. In analyzing these maps, terms were weighted based on their location in reference to the centermost term of the map. Information regarding the proximity of the terms to each other and which terms are connected was also drawn from the concept map dataset. This first round of analysis indicates that students, for the most part, were drawing the expected connections between the different terms and topics. However, there were instances where students isolated topics, missed topics, or had them wrongly associated. This suggests that it may be beneficial for the teaching team to more explicitly or repeatedly connect certain topics throughout the course in lectures, class exercises and homework assignments. Suggestions for improving the concept map assignment are also discussed.