TECMap: Technology-Enhanced Concept Mapping for Curriculum Organization and Intelligent Support

This paper extends a previous publication describing a system that utilizes a wide variety of available assessment information to automatically analyze students’ understanding at a conceptual level and offer relevant automated support to teachers and students. This organization and support can be at the course level or at the level of curriculum for an entire program of study. Intelligent support includes interactive visualization of the conceptual knowledge assessment, individualized suggestions for resources, and suggestions for student groups based on conceptual knowledge assessment. This system differs from prior related work in that it can operate on entire program curricula, and that the basis for analysis and feedback is entirely customized to the individual instructors’ course content. We discuss how the system is configured for courses and the curriculum levels, and describe our experience that indicates the benefits of the approach. We then provide detailed descriptions of how the system performs analysis and offers support in both course and curriculum scenarios.