Graphical Interface for Knowledge Structures (GIKS)

GIKS (Graphical Interface for Knowledge Structures) is a web-based educational tool that converts learners’ written text into a graph of concepts and links, making their underlying knowledge structure visible and analyzable. By extracting key ideas and their relationships from responses, it generates a network that can be compared with expert or reference structures to highlight overlaps, gaps, and misconceptions in understanding. Instructors and researchers use GIKS to support writing-to-learn activities, provide structural feedback on students’ conceptual understanding, and study how closely learners’ mental models align with target expertise across different domains.