"[D]o students correctly learn their discipline and properly frame it cognitively so that they use it in practice? Concept maps and concept inventories can examine this from macro and micro perspectives. Concept mapping is an established tool... designed to measure conceptual organization, or how students organized the knowledge they have learned (or not learned). These maps are... graphical organizers for thoughts, theories, and/or concepts in a particular discipline... Understanding is schematically represented by creating a hierarchy of ideas of concepts linked together through branches of subconcepts, with interrelationships indicated by additional branches or cross-links... [T]he difficulty in using them for assessment has been in their scoring. ...Maps usually are scored by counting concepts, links, and hierarchies. Recently more sophisticated approaches have appeared that better facilitate their use as an outcome assessment tool. ...Concept inventories for various engineering subject areas have been developed to measure... conceptual understanding... of such fundamental, small-scale phenomena as heat, light, diffusion, chemical reactions, and electricity..."