Using concept maps in knowledge assessment of short and open answer questions

Knowledge Assessment is an important part of the learning process as it allows the learner to keep track of their progress in the knowledge acquisition process. There are several types of assessment techniques. Among them, we find questions with short and open answers (SOA Questions). The evaluation of these questions with open and short answers, where the learner has to develop a response going of some words to 5 lines, constitutes a type of complex assessment technique. This paper presents a novel approach regarding knowledge assessment of SOA questions using concept maps. We propose a scenario for using this type of questions in online learning environments and describe our approach for automatically evaluating this type of questions using concept maps and similarities measures.