Abstract
Students are often challenged by the demand of writing cohesive explanatory texts. Prior research has shown that providing students with concept map feedback that visualizes explanatory cohesion deficits helped students generate more cohesive explanations. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether the accuracy of the provided information within the concept map feedback affected students’ improvements of cohesion. Accordingly, we varied the represented accuracy of information within such concept maps: Students either received accurate concept map feedback that depicted the real relations between concepts, as well as the authentic cohesion gaps in their explanations, or students received inaccurate concept map feedback, which depicted randomly drawn relations and random cohesion gaps. Additionally, in a baseline condition, students did not receive any feedback. We found that the students in the accurate feedback condition generated more cohesive explanations than the students in the no-feedback condition, whereas the students in the inaccurate feedback condition lay in-between. Evidently, providing feedback in general can be regarded as beneficial to enhance students’ writing. However, the accuracy of the provided feedback further impacts the effectiveness of computer-generated concept maps.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration, and the German Psychological Society’s (DGPS) ethical guidelines. According to the DGPS guidelines, experimental studies only need approval from an institutional review board if participants are exposed to risks that are related to high emotional or physical stress or when participants are not informed about the goals and procedures included in the study. As none of these conditions applied to the current study, we did not seek approval from an institutional review board.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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We would like to thank Christian Burkhart for the programming of the concept map feedback tool; Nathanael Kautz, and Tim Steininger for helping us with collecting and coding the data.
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Lachner, A., Backfisch, I. & Nückles, M. Does the accuracy matter? Accurate concept map feedback helps students improve the cohesion of their explanations. Education Tech Research Dev 66, 1051–1067 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9571-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9571-4