Convergent Validity: Concept Maps and Competence Test for Students' Diagnosis in Physics (original) (raw)

In almost every lesson teachers diagnose their students concerning knowledge and activities, but most of them do so without appropriate diagnostic instruments. With the use of concept maps, the present study aims to offer physics teachers a suitable diagnostic instrument with an adequate analysis form for an instant use in their lessons. In a preliminary step, we first pinpointed what kind of knowledge concept maps measure. Therefore a sample of 79 ninth-grade German secondary school students drew concept maps under the instruction of two different task formats and afterwards filled out a competence test. For both task formats the concept maps were evaluated with the same scoring system and were tested for convergent validation against the competence test on the physics topic of energy. The results show a positive correlation between these two instruments and figure differences between the different task formats.