Identifying Core Issues in Concept Maps

Abstract

Preliminary informal investigations carried out by our research group suggest that concept maps often contain a small number of identifiable core issues. Studying several concept maps which were referred to in various sources as typical examples of maps which were created by experts and novices, the result remains strikingly the same: The higher the expertise of the person who created the map, the easier the identification of these core issues seems to be. In this paper we attempt to formally investigate this statement. More specifically, in this paper we study two hypotheses: (a) concept maps are built around a small number of core issues and (b) core issues may be identified by human evaluators and specialized software. These hypotheses are investigated by examining 45 concept maps from various fields developed by novices or experts.