Concept mapping and assessment of virtual laboratory experimental knowledge

Quantitative assessment of learning is an important indicator of teaching practices apart from the depth and grasp of content being assessed. Fundamental objective of assessment approaches should help promote learner engagement and is appropriate to the diversity of learners that may be present in any class. Learning from online or virtual classrooms can be more challenging due to lack of direct personal engagement between the teacher and the student. There are various modes of assessment commonly adopted today and students may exhibit different levels of performance based on the assessment method. This paper focuses on cross-comparison of these techniques to learning of laboratory concepts in a virtual environment. Apart from comparison of the commonly used assessment methods such as multiple choice questions, descriptive questions, true/false statements etc., the work explores the best methodology to correlate assessment from a reliability and validity perspective to the learning objectives and measure the progress of individual students. Correlating the innate learning styles of students to assessment approaches is another outcome of this work. In addition, the use of concept maps to assess the relationship between various science based principles is characterized for two different experimental labs with N=147 students. The advantages to using assessment techniques from a `time-to-assess' is also elaborated in this work.