Concept maps similarity measures for educational applications

Abstract

Concept maps represent a significant tool in education, used to plan and guide learning activities and to help teachers in some endeavors such as analyzing and refining their teaching strategies, retrieving suitable learning material, and supporting the provision of adaptive guidance in adaptive learning environments. Here we propose seven measures of similarity among concept maps, representing course modules. They deal with both structural and didactic aspects of the maps, to find out educational similarities among their associated course modules. The performance of the proposed similarity measures are analyzed and evaluated by means of some significant case studies.