Knowpats: Patterns of Declarative Knowledge - Searching Frequent Knowledge Patterns about Object-orientation

In order to better understand the structure of students’ knowledge in computer science, we are trying to identify patterns – in form of frequently occurring subgraphs – in concept maps. Concept maps are an externalization of a person’s declarative knowledge represented as a graph. We propose an algorithm that can be employed to identify frequently occurring subgraphs, based on existing algorithms in that field. We are currently working on a project that will gather concept maps form a large group of freshman in the coming semesters, providing us with extensive material for information mining about the structures of knowledge in CS. We hope to get a better understanding of the relationship between knowledge and competence.