The Unless Switch: Adding Conditional Logic to Concept Mapping for Middle School Students

Concept maps can be used for both teaching and assessment purposes. It has been demonstrated that showing students a concept map detailing the structure of a domain better prepares students to assimilate information from that domain.

Betty's Brain is a learning-by teaching environment where students "teach" Betty by constructing a concept map that models relations between domain concepts. Betty then assesses her knowledge in a performance venue, such as by taking a quiz. Based on how well Betty performs, students can revise their agent’s knowledge.

Betty implements both uses of concept maps. Students receive a passage and are asked to teach it to Betty. As a novice learner, Betty forces students to formalize their knowledge by having them create concept maps in order to teach it. These concept maps can then be assessed by
comparing them to an expert concept map. How well the student’s map matches the expert map determines how well the student has structured his or her knowledge

We also consider about the incorporating conditional logic into Betty. There are two goals for that:

i) Develop an interface that reflects the semantic structure people naturally use to think about
thresholds and activation states.

ii) Represents the reasoning within Betty’s concept maps.

The notion of thresholds within a concept map. Students often create multiple nodes representing different levels of the same concept and link them together.

For example, in the domain of water ecosystems, students sometimes create both an “algae” and a “more algae” node to indicate that increasing “algae” increases the amount of oxygen in a pond, but that “more algae” decreases the amount of oxygen. In this case, Betty tells the students that it is confused about the relationship between the two nodes and asks them to resolve the conflict.

INITIAL PROTOTYPE

We used triangle in the initial prototype to show the state of the source node.

Arrows leading from each state to the target node
Red color indicates the high state

Green color indicates the normal state

White color indicates the low state

For example, if we increase nitrogen, and nitrogen is high (red state), we decrease plant growth.

But in first prototype the students complained that, having scattered colored triangles throughout the concept map made it difficult to see the overall structure due to the clutter.

2nd Prototype

In this prototype we investigate the application of statecharts instead of triangles. At the high level, statecharts look vary similar to concept maps. The boxes in a state chart represent a state and the processes that happen within that state.

But in the case of state chart representation, students still exhibited confusion about whether to treat the boxes as states or nodes.

Final Prototype

In the final design, instead of thinking about the concept maps, we used "unless" clauses because this protype is a more natural way of presenting the information than that of Ist and 2nd prototypes.

Second, it emphasizes the normal relationship (nitrogen increases plant growth), and indicates that the alternative is atypical (unless it is too high). Our previous prototypes gave equal emphasis to all states. Finally, it does not require illustration of state changes.

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