Exploring Mind Maps for Assessment in an Introductory Chemical Engineering Course

Mind maps are a study tool for students to visualize and organization in a way that emphasizes the way that concepts are connected to one another. Their use has been documented in several technical fields, including medicine, industrial engineering, and environmental engineering. Many publications on the use of mind maps or concept maps include one or more ideas on how to assess the quality of these diagrams. In this work in progress, we summarize different ways that have already been proposed and implemented in the literature to evaluate mind maps. Some rubrics view a map holistically, while others attempt to deconstruct maps into component pieces, like number of topics or number of connections, for scoring. We describe our experiences using some of these approaches in evaluating our own use of mind maps in the classroom. We have collected two years’ worth of mind maps from the University of Delaware’s Introduction to Chemical Engineering course as part of an end-of-semester exercise that is presented to students as a final exam preparation activity. We seek to address two questions using this activity: (1) Is there any relationship between the quality of mind maps and student performance in the course, and (2) Is there any significant change between the 2016 and 2017 student responses that may have resulted from changes made to the course between these years? Indirectly, we seek to determine whether mind maps would be a useful measure for direct assessment to track continuous improvement initiatives related to this course. We also seek to determine whether one established strategy for assessing mind maps is more amenable to addressing these questions than others.