Examining Concept Maps as an Assessment Tool

In this paper, I describe concept maps as assessment tools for measuring one aspect of achievement, the organization of declarative knowledge in a domain. A concept map-based assessment consists of a task that elicits connected understanding, a response format, and a scoring system. Variation in tasks, response formats, and scoring systems produce different mapping techniques that may elicit different knowledge representations, posing construct-interpretation challenges. The paper provides a framework to guide the research on the technical quality of this tool. It will briefly describe some of the studies conducted and it will focus on some of the dimensions that can be used to define the assessment task.