Expérimentation de la cartographie conceptuelle comme dispositif de collecte de données en vue de l’évaluation des apprentissages

Concept map is a very versatile and multipurpose knowledge representation tool in education (Cañas et al., 2003, Cañas and Novak, 2008; Marchand and d'Ivernois, 2004). In the domain of assessment, many have recognized its potential to assess dimensions of learning that are not captured using traditional instruments (Edmondson, 2005; Novak and Cañas, 2008, Ruiz-Primo, Schultz, Li and Shavelson, 2001). Nevertheless, scientific knowledge about it is still scattered and incomplete, despite the long tradition of this tool in education, spread over a few decades. Through three articles, this dissertation aims to deepen knowledge about the modalities of production, grading and scoring of concept maps. The first article focuses on the differences between response processes when the map is produced in a traditional way on paper with a pencil or using a computer with a dedicated software. To do this, eight Secondary IV students in science and technology completed a concept mapping task while verbalizing their thoughts aloud. In addition to underscore some sequences of actions and strategies inherent to each modality, the analyses of this study highlight difficulties encountered by the participants during the performance of the task. These observations are a reminder of the importance of prior training in concept mapping. The second article describes the development of a software to assist humans during the generation of a concept map using texts, this map can ideally serve as a reference map for grading maps produced by students. The software was tested by considering the themes of the two tasks submitted to students in the other two parts of this research and its performance was evaluated by comparing the maps extracted with the software and the maps extracted manually from the same texts. Although, overall, the results of this test are quite encouraging, it still seems premature to use these maps for the use initially targeted by the software. The article, however, identifies other potential and less restrictive uses of the software and lists some areas for improvement. The third and final article explores the modelling of scores from concept maps of 84 Secondary IV students in science and technology using the partial credit model (Masters, 1982). By evaluating the psychometric properties of a concept mapping task in science and technology, especially by examining the assumption of local independence and the assumption of unidimensionality that characterizes the measurement models from the family of Rasch models, this study highlights some peculiarities in the internal structure of scores and challenges some of the conventional approaches to note concept maps. Each of these three articles provides additional insights into the use of concept map as a data collection tool and contributes to the validation process of this tool for the assessment of learning.

Keyphrases: Concept map, Educational assessment, Think-aloud, Students' strategies, Automatic generation of concept map, Text analysis, Natural language processing, Concept map scoring, Measurement models, Rasch models