A New Metric to Help Teachers Unveil Meaningful Learning in Concept Maps

Concept Maps are effective tools to represent and share one’s vision about a particular knowledge domain or topic, in a personal, graphic and structured way. They are widely used and recommended in the educational field to both students and teachers. Most of students use Concept Maps at school, to better represent and share their knowledge, and to represent learning about a particular topic. Moreover, teachers take advantage of the potential of Concept Maps, to evaluate students, also with respect to the occurrence of meaningful learning. Here we propose a new metrics (the Concept Entropy), devised to provide a teacher with significant information about the topological placement of concepts in a Concept Map, and the possible occurrence of meaningful learning. An experimental activity on a selection of basic Concept Maps structures shows the usefulness of the new metrics, by comparing it with two baseline metrics.