Cronus: An Automated Feedback Tool for Concept Maps

A Concept map is a pedagogical tool to help students understand the concepts and identify their misconceptions. Grading a concept map is a time-consuming manual task causing a severe bottleneck to use concept maps in a large class effectively. This paper presents Cronus that provides useful feedback on a student concept map similar to manual assessment by comparing it with an instructor concept map. The feedback includes identifying misconceptions, finding concepts, links, and branches that are (partially) matched or missed from a student concept map, generating summary statistics based on the feedback, and suggesting a grade of the map using predefined criteria (by the instructor) on the summary stats. Cronus is evaluated on a dataset of 74 student concept maps collected as homework assignments in an undergraduate (senior-level) course on introductory computer security. The evaluation results show that Cronus can provide accurate feedback on student concept maps compared to the manual evaluation of the maps and automatically suggest their correct grades.