For researchers
Group Concept Mapping produces a shared picture. The harder question comes next: how does that picture become an intervention you can research and defend? This page describes that step, because it is precisely where the GCM literature tends to leave you stranded. ConceptAtlas is built for it.
The framework
Take educational design research (McKenney and Reeves) as your guiding framework, with design principles as the final deliverable. Group Concept Mapping sits entirely in the first phase. Conjecture mapping (Sandoval) is the hinge between phase 1 and phase 2.
What is alive here, how does it hang together, what has priority. The concept map, the go-zone and the bridging values belong in this phase.
GCM sits hereFrom themes to an intervention: making conjectures explicit and translating them into a concrete design you can actually build.
Does it work, and why. Iterations eventually yield design principles that transfer to other contexts.
Making the translation
This is the part you have to write out explicitly. Four choices determine whether your clusters become usable in the design.
The focus prompt determines your entire design space. The difference between "what is needed for" and "what teachers concretely do when" is later the difference between usable and unusable clusters.
Place clusters in the embodiment column of your conjecture map: tools and materials, task structures, participatory structures, discursive practices.
A cluster may span several columns. Leaving it unsorted is the actual problem.
Use the go-zone to order, not to strike items off. What scores high on importance and low on feasibility is often the most interesting design problem of all.
Bridging says something the cluster solution itself does not. A cluster with high bridging is conceptually diffuse: there is no shared understanding there.
That is a finding in its own right, and worth naming explicitly in your reporting.
The deliverable
Use Van den Akker's heuristic format. It forces you to state the context conditions for each principle, instead of writing down a loose recommendation.
The format
If you want to design X for purpose Y in context Z, then do A, B and C, because of P, Q and R.
Thinking ahead
A separate outcome or process measure. GCM is your needs analysis, not an outcome measure. For the iterations you need a measure of your own. Arrange it early, because it determines your data collection in the field.
Fix what is fixed, and allow what may move. The theoretical conjectures are fixed; the embodiment may change between iterations. Without that distinction every adjustment becomes a defence problem instead of a result.
The second route
Alongside the design route, ConceptAtlas offers a systems route to interventions. The group judges how the themes influence one another; that causal model can be run. This lets you explore which theme actually creates movement before you start designing.
The weights are judgements of the group, not measured effects. Treat the outcome as an exploration of direction and dynamics, and report it as such. The assumptions and the adjustable parameters are open in the environment.
Accountability
The environment computes the usual quality measures so you can report them in your methods section: stress for the fit of the map, split-half reliability, bridging per statement and per cluster, and stress per statement. All raw data can be exported as CSV, keeping your analyses reproducible and open to checking.
The algorithms used and the licence are described openly on the method page.
References
We are happy to think along about the focus prompt, the design of the sorting and rating rounds, and the fit with your research design. Including for Erasmus+ and other consortium projects, where the same map across several countries is often the most revealing result.
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