Courses-Concepts-Graphs as a Tool to Measure the Importance of Concepts in University Programmes

摘要

This paper investigates methods for quantitatively assessing the importance and relative importance of concepts taught in a university program. This assessment has many uses, e.g., to aid program design and inventory, and for communicating what concepts a course may rely on at a given point in the program. We propose to perform this quantitative assessment in two steps: first, representing the university program as an opportune graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as edges; second, by quantitatively defining each concept's importance as its centrality as a node within the network. We thus perform two investigations, both leveraging a practical case - data collected from two engineering programs at two Swedish university: a) how to represent university programs in terms of graphs (here called Courses-Concepts Graph (CCG)), and b) how to reinterpret the most classical graph-theoretical node centrality indexes in the pedagogical term of concept centrality index.