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DECONSTRUCTING CONCEPT MAPS: UNCOVERING THE READING BEHIND THE CONCEPTS
THROUGH TEXT ANNOTATION
Xabier Garmendia1, Oscar Díaz1 & Haritz Medina1
1University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), San Sebastian, Spain
Email: {xabier.garmendiad, oscar.diaz, haritz.medina}@ehu.eus
Abstract. Teachers have successfully applied concept maps in education al settings. In particular, concept maps have been
recognized as an effective tool for diagnosing students’ misunderstandings. Frequently, students create concept maps from
reading materials that teachers provide to develop the necessary background to draw the map. However, when it comes to tracing
back the root of these misunderstandings, concept maps fall short. A concept map captures a mindset snap but not the reading
experiences that underpin this mindset. The rationale that drives the creation of the map’s concepts and relationships is often not
explicit but in the students’ heads. This rationale should be sought in the reading material, provided by teachers and ‘processed’
by the students to deliver the concept map. On these premises, concept mapping starts way before students draw their maps but at
reading time. This turns concept mapping into an annotation activity. Annotation serves as a link between the reading content
and the developed concept map. Highlighting or commenting on class books is the prelude to drawing nodes and arcs.
Accordingly, we advocate for concept mapping tools to be extended with annotation facilities so that concepts and relationships
can be traced back to the books’ highlights that informed these decisions, and, in so doing, allows teachers to gain a deeper
insight into students’ misconceptions. This paper provides a proof of concept through Concept&Go, a web browser extension for
building concept maps in CmapTools grounded on annotations.
Keywords: concept mapping, web annotation, education, traceability
1 Introduction
Since they were developed in the course of Novak’s research program, a large body of literature emerged
pertaining to the use of Concept Mapping in educational settings (Novak et al., 1984; Cañas et al., 2003). The
construction of concept maps assists in organizing, sharing, and representing knowledge, which leads to a visual
indication of the student’s conceptual understanding and misconceptions about the given focus question.
Indeed, the role of concept maps in the diagnosis of students’ misunderstandings has been demonstrated by
their sensitivity to (i) the structural nature of student knowledge, (ii) intrusions or distortions in students’
understanding of content, and (iii) errors of omission (Surber, 1984; McClure et al., 1999). Yet, it is not yet
clear how to trace back the origins of these misunderstandings. This begs the question of how concept maps are
elaborated.
Students' knowledge does not come out of the blue. Teachers play a key role in facilitating and instructing
the map construction process (Atapattu et al., 2014). One of the ways to assist students' concept mapping
process is by facilitating reading materials associated with the topic or focus question. Here, students are asked
to construct a concept map to reflect their understanding and measurement of the text comprehension from the
given resources. Concept mapping has been shown to be valid for learning from reading materials enhancing
comprehension and summarization skills (Cañas et al., 2003; Cañas et al., 2008; Chang et al., 2002). Learning
from texts can provide important functions such as (i) fostering elaboration processes, (ii) reducing content for
enhancing the acquisition and retention of ideas, (iii) facilitating the construction of coherence, and (iv)
supporting metacognitive processes (Hilbert et al., 2008).
Students' outcoming concept map is followed by the validation from teachers. The latter allows teachers to
note missing or irrelevant concepts, and trivial or incorrect linking phrases (Cañas et al., 2003). It is not easy for
teachers to find what is behind these misunderstandings. Though concept maps might help spot students'
mistakes, they fall short to trace back their causes. Specifically, the grounding reading that underpins the map
element is not explicit but in the students’ heads. Needed is a way to make explicit the link between the reading
material and the students’ concept map elements. To this end, we look at annotation-based concept map
construction.
Annotation is a time-honored practice to assist in understanding and making understood reading material. If
the instruction is supported through reading materials, students can complement their concept maps with
annotations that sustain the concepts and relationships their concept maps are built upon. This would allow
teachers to go beyond the concept map, and ascertain what makes students create a map element. In this way,
concept constructs are linked back to annotations that come from one or distinct reading sources. By keeping
annotations, teachers might be able ‘to deconstruct’ the concept map. Certainly, annotation gathering should be
achieved as seamlessly as possible without disturbing the reading flow. This is when web annotation tools come
into play. This work introduces Concept&Go, a browser extension that bridges Hypothes.is as annotation
manager and CmapTools as the concept map editor.
2 Annotation-based concept mapping
Annotation includes highlighting text, adding comments, or classifying the annotated content. Annotation aids
in the mediation of the reading-writing interaction. While reading, people underline crucial passages, identify
plot devices, and remark on structure and dialogue. When writing, people refer to those passages or remark
points to later write a report or a final paper. Annotation has been proved to be an effective way of aiding in the
comprehension and interpretation of written information (Kawase et al., 2009).
Annotation becomes ‘Web Annotation’ when the content is a ‘Web resource’ and the process takes place on
the Web. Implementation-wise, Web annotations are displayed as a layer on top of the Web content. The
annotation layer is usually provided by a web annotation client, which allows users to add, modify or remove
annotations upon a web resource without modifying the resource itself.
Annotation can be regarded as the preamble of concept mapping. Annotation is a means to content
comprehension. Content comprehension absorbs different external experiences (reading included) that build up
a mindset. This mindset is made explicit through concept mapping. Thus, tightly integrating the activities of
annotation and concept mapping would account for a seamless transition from the construction of concept maps
out of annotations, and the other way around, i.e., the de-construction of concept maps into the readings that
underpin the mind map (see Fig.1).
Figure 1. Constructing and deconstructing concept maps from annotations.
But, what is meant by ‘tightly integrating’? Implications are twofold:
• Concept mapping is a gradual-and-iterative process. If concept mapping is to be founded on
annotations, then annotation is not a one-shot effort but one to be conducted throughout. This
annotation-mapping interplay calls for a smooth and seamless transition from the annotation space to
the mapping space,
• Concept mapping is a trial-and-error process. When looking at the students’ maps, teachers might turn
to annotations to find out the underpinning readings that led to the students’ misconceptions: what
makes students come up with this concept? What leads students to set this relationship? How could
they miss this important notion described in the textbook? This calls for being able to trace concepts
and relationships in the map back to the reading material.
Tool-wise, three options arise: (1) concept mapping to be offered as part of annotation tools; (2) annotation
to be offered as part of concept mapping editors; and (3), a bridge approach that acts as a ‘conveyor belt’
between two decouple tools: the annotation tool and the mapping tool. We follow this last approach.
3 Proof-of-concept: Concept&Go
Concept&Go is a web annotation tool aimed at concept mapping. When the reading material (PDF or Web
content) is opened in a browser tab, Concept&Go can be activated with a single click. This causes a sidebar to
show up on the left part of the document. This sidebar contains the concepts collected so far (see Fig. 2.1).
Compared with other Web tools (e.g., Diigo), Concept&Go does not stop at highlighting quotes from text
paragraphs but elaborates on the so-gathered quotes to come up with concepts and relationships. From this
perspective, Concept&Go is not stand-alone but requires two companions: Hypothes.is
1
as the annotations’
persistent storage, and CmapCloud (the cloud service of CmapTools)
2
to depict the developed concept map with
its annotations. Next, we review the steps of concept mapping along with ‘The Standard Concept Map
Construction Method’ (Cañas et al., 2003).
Figure 2. Constructing and deconstructing concept maps using annotations in Concept&Go. Mimick ing Open Coding, text paragraphs
highlighted during readings (i.e., annotations) are abstracted into concepts and relationships during concept mapping.
Focus Question definition. Through reading, students discover new concepts and relationships. This step
involves defining which will be the topic of the concept map. The first time Concept&Go is activated, it asks to
introduce the topic of the new concept map. In the example of Fig. 2, we will use ‘Photosynthesis’. Once the
student defines a topic, the topic concept is established as the root node of the concept map and it is displayed as
a button in the sidebar.
Concept handling. Through annotation, students capture text fragments that are eventually abstracted into
a new concept. Broadly, this is Open Coding as introduced by the Grounded-Theory method (Walker et al.,
2006). Through color-coding, Concept&Go allows for concepts to be created on the fly: highlight the text
paragraph expressing the concept (e.g., “plants”), and click ‘New concept’. This turns the quote into a concept,
and, as such, supports it as a button in the side panel (see Fig. 2.1). From then on, the occurrence of this concept
in the current text can be highlighted by clicking this dedicated button. The codes can be linked to a line, a
sentence, a paragraph, or wholesome text. This results in a (concept, occurrence, document) annotation triplet to
1
https://web.hypothes.is/
2
https://cmapcloud.ihmc.us/
be stored in Hypothes.is. Certainly, occurrences might take different ways to express the concept and can be
captured from different reading materials. Annotation involves abstraction from the written realization to the
abstract notion embedded by the concept. Concept names can be changed at any time as students come up with
the most accurate terminology. In Fig. 2.1, “photosynthesis” and “plants” are captured while reading a
Wikipedia page.
Relationship handling. Relationships involve two concepts linked through a linking word. As well as with
concepts, students can find ‘concept-link-concept’ triples propositions while reading. These relationships can be
found written explicitly, implicitly, or collected on a table. Therefore, the student has to be able to capture the
relationship by annotating the linking word in the same way as with concepts. To complete a relationship, it is
necessary to provide the "from" and "to" concepts together with the linking word. When the student detects a
candidate linking word in the text, the student has to annotate the text fragment by clicking the ‘New relation’
button. Then, Concept&Go opens a panel where the students can select the concepts that are involved in the
relationship by selecting two concepts from the list of the current concepts. Concept&Go allows visualizing,
editing, and deleting the relationships. Fig. 2.1 illustrates how the linking word “used by” is captured while
reading in Wikipedia. Fig. 2.3 shows the visualization once exported to CmapCloud.
Map reviewing. A set of annotations is not a concept map but ground a concept map. Annotations go
through abstraction to end up in a (tentative) concept map. Concept&Go permits exporting annotations to
CmapCloud. The exported folder contains both the concept map itself plus the associated annotation resources
(URLs) (see Fig. 2.2). By supporting annotations as URLs rather than mere text, it is possible to navigate back
to the reading material. Fig. 2 shows the case for “organisms”. Concepts are now displayed together with their
annotation counterparts. Click on the annotation icon ( ), for opening the annotations in subsequent browser
tabs (see Fig. 2.3). Students can then go back to the reading sources where the annotation appears, check back
their annotations, update as appropriate, and when convenient, move back to see the whole picture again in
CmapCloud. Fig. 2.4 illustrates the case of the student moving back to the annotations which underpin the
‘organisms’ concept in Wikipedia. She also decides to consult the Biolibre website where she finds out about
‘Cyanobacteria’ and ‘Plants’ as the only ‘Organisms’ that perform photosynthesis. This results in renaming
‘organisms’ (Fig. 2.5). Likewise, the student annotates two additional pieces of evidence for the ‘store solar
energy’ concept and the relation with photosynthesis (Fig. 2.5). This ends up being reflected in the concept map
(Fig. 2.6) where the text “is vital because” is abstracted in the relationship “important for” (Fig. 2.6).
The bottom line is that construction (moving from the Reading realm to the Mapping realm) and de-
construction (moving from the Mapping realm to the Reading realm) interplay throughout.
4 Conclusions and Future Work
Annotation and concept mapping can be regarded as the visible activities that mediate the invisible task of
understanding. These activities (i.e., annotation and concept mapping) are far from being sequential but
intermingled throughout. This annotation-mapping interplay calls for a smooth and seamless transition from the
annotation space to the mapping space. To this end, we introduce Concept&Go, a browser extension for web
annotation aimed at concept mapping. The vision is for concept mapping to become
• a gradual and iterative construction of concept maps by supporting a seamless interplay between
annotation and mapping,
• a trial-and-error process where students and teachers alike can trace concepts back to the reading
sources, and in so doing, face misunderstandings.
Concept&Go can be installed from the Chrome Web Store and it is publicly available under the MIT
license on GitHub. Our ultimate aim is to promote debate among the community about the large potential that
the marriage between annotation and concept mapping can bring. We are enthusiastic about teaming up with
teachers and researchers in evaluating, improving, and disseminating the Concept&Go vision.
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