Development and evaluation of a Web-based e-book with a concept mapping system

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a Web-based e-book with a concept mapping system and the process and results of a concept mapping course in which 139 seventh-grade students used the developed system. Two iterated system development cycles were completed. The second system prototype provides an e-book system and a concept mapping system on the same Web page. Users can read an article and construct a concept map for the article simultaneously. Concept mapping course was conducted during a 3-week period. The results of the course showed that the students demonstrated a positive attitude toward concept mapping after using the system in the course. However, the quality of their concept maps is low. Several mistakes that the students frequently made were explored. In addition, the analysis of the students’ annotation behaviors showed that some students use text highlight to support their construction of concept maps. However, an independent-sample t test did not demonstrate a significant effect of text highlight on the quality of concept maps. These results provide directions for our future work. Furthermore, several requirements are summarized in this paper according to the feedback of the teacher and students. These requirements are the base for our next iterative system and course design.