Courses-Concepts-Graphs as a Tool to Measure the Importance of Concepts in University Programmes

• This paper investigates methods for quantitatively assessing the importance and relative importance of concepts taught in a university program. This assessment has many uses, e.g., to aid program design and inventory, and for communicating what concepts a course may rely on at a given point in the program. We propose to perform this quantitative assessment in two steps: first, representing the university program as an opportune graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as edges; second, by quantitatively defining each concept's importance as its centrality as a node within the network. We thus perform two investigations, both leveraging a practical case - data collected from two engineering programs at two Swedish university: a) how to represent university programs in terms of graphs (here called Courses-Concepts Graph (CCG)), and b) how to reinterpret the most classical graph-theoretical node centrality indexes in the pedagogical term of concept centrality index.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Courses Concepts Matrix

Courses Concepts Graph

University Program Design

Centrality Indexes

English and Education

Engelska med didaktisk inriktning

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)