On mind maps evaluation: A case of an automatic grader development

Abstract

Nowadays, mind mapping is a rather popular educational technique. Moreover, mind maps became a part of modern educational trends like blended learning and computer-supported collaborative learning. Lots of mind mapping software tools are adopted to teaching and learning routines such as educational content delivery or assessment. This paper focuses on the additional automatic evaluation of digital educational mind maps gained from the existing procedures of assessments. The review of automatic graders which support the evaluation process demonstrated that some systematical work is done in automation grading by comparing students’ mind maps with a template. But lots of questions about automatic mind maps’ scoring by retrieving the data from a scored mind map are still open. This paper introduces the automatic grader for educational mind maps (AGEMM) which acts like a teacher’s assistant and calculates several quantitative metrics. The AGEMM is implemented as a web-service and interacted with digital mind maps prepared in the Coggle web-service through its API. The AGEMM is adopted to the Scientific Research Seminar of “Marketing” bachelor program in National Research University Higher School of Economics (Perm). Results demonstrate that scores from the AGEMM may be transformed to scales or criterial levels which are used to evaluation. Moreover, the AGEMM application revealed several problems and shew lines of development which we discuss in the paper.