Concept mapping

Using concept maps in the classroom may offer a means of measuring student understanding and intellectual growth throughout the semester.  It may also provide me with a means of measuring instructional effectiveness... effectively.

With concept maps, its not merely enough to identify and remember concepts, taxonomies, or facts.  You need to be able to identify the relationship between them.  True understanding of concepts comes from integrating an idea with all of the other ideas in one's mind.  Concept maps provide a perfect means of capturing this integration by requesting relationships in the form of verbs.  So for example, a "table has legs".  Table and legs are the concepts.  "has" is the relationship between them.

After creating my 5 year goals, I have been looking for a way to measure conceptual understanding of material to compare instructional effectiveness.  With concept maps, I should have the means to do so.  For reach course module, I will need to develop master concept maps  - which I then compare with student concept maps as they write them.  Grading of concepts maps can be accomplished by ensuring important concepts are included, relationships between concepts is properly identified, and holistic understanding is demonstrated.  Furthermore, I can look at the average grade from a class and compare it to the average grade from other classes to determine how various techniques influence conceptual understanding.

4 article possibilities

As I expand on an article I wrote on the hierarchy of concepts in education, it occurred to me (after reading the reviews from my conference proceeding) that reviewers of most business education journals may find the article less "innovative" (and less worthy of publication) than Ayn Rand' theory of concepts really is.  To that end, I want to transition my original article into a comparison between Objectivism's philosophy of education and other dominant theories.  There are several possible directions I can take and would like your input as to which to pursue:

1. Subjective experience versus Objective knowledge
Subjective experience in education is an artifact of Dewey's philosophy of education.  My original paper could be transitioned to this relatively easily, but the contents may be a bit abstract for the journals I have in mind.  I would still have a difficult sell, but one that I believe is possible.

2. Team work versus Individual work
Team work is very popular topic in business education journals.  Team work in and of itself is not a bad thing to incorporate into the classroom, if an objective of the class is to improve communication, collaboration, and planning skills.  However, it is a poor means of building knowledge of concepts.  Relating the theory of knowledge to team work can offer some tantalizing propositions, but will require much more effort to transition the article.

3.  Academic service learning (ASL)
I've written about my experiences with ASL before and its good and bad aspects.  This topic would be a variation of the first option, but far more publishable.  But it would also require much more effort to transition the article.  In fact it would probably be better to start this one from scratch.

4. Classifications versus Cause-effect relationships
While the meat of my article would remain essentially untouched, the introduction would require some magical writing to convince readers of the problem without empirical data to support my assertion.  Essentially, I've found that most textbooks in IS focus almost exclusively on classifying technologies, nearly completely ignoring cause-effect relationships.   The lack of cause-effect relationships means principles are never addressed.  So students know what technologies are called, but not how to use them appropriately.

Of course, I could write an article on each of these topics (and may eventually), but right now, I need to take the paper I've started and get it published. Any thoughts?