Concept specification maps: displaying content structures

In introductory courses there are topics with a huge amount of concepts and interdependencies between them. Especially in the course materials the relevant definitions or specifications are widely spread. This paper presents a semi-automatic way of text analysis to display the structure of concepts in literature such as textbooks. Therefore we searched for text paragraphs that contain a definition or specification of a given concept. From the results we built a graphical representation, containing "definition-nodes" that show the logical structure of those concepts. We call it a Concept Specification Map. Furthermore we show an application of the method on five textbooks of introductory courses into object-oriented programming. We present the results of the analysis and draw some conclusions on their influence regarding introductory courses.

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