Diversity of Concept Mapping Tasks: Degree of Difficulty, Directedness, and Task Constraints

Concept maps have been used for knowledge assessment already for several decades. At the same time no extensive overview has been made on possible concept mapping tasks and no formal methods have been developed for comparing the degree of difficulty of different assessment tasks based on concept maps. There are only some research studies on task characterization, task comparison, use of different tasks for assessing students with different knowledge level and extending task types considering constraints on sets of concepts and linking phrases. The paper examines diversity of concept mapping tasks from the perspective of possible task constraints which are considered in relation to the directedness continuum as a factor of the degree of task difficulty. The main contributions are the general view on diversity of concept mapping tasks and the detailed framework for identification of possible concept mapping tasks taking into account task constraints.