Identifying significant implications using computational support

Abstract

It is essential for a constructivist teacher to monitor the apprenticeship of each student in order to facilitate the definition of the next steps in the development of a discipline. Since monitor the apprenticeship is a very complex and time-consuming task, a theoretical framework that supports the observations of the teacher becomes necessary. The use of concept maps to record a students understanding of a subject can simplify this process a lot. In the construction of concept maps, when we are choosing a relationship between two concepts, we are creating, ultimately, what Piaget calls “a meaningful implication” that evolves according to the semantic nature of the relation that we create. We propose here, via a specific tool, an environment for the automatic identification of the meaningful implications in a concept map made by a prototype.