Using Concept Inventories to Measure Understanding

Measuring understanding is notoriously difficult. Indeed, in formulating learning outcomes the word “understanding” is usually avoided, but in the sciences, developing understanding is one of the main aims of instruction. Scientific knowledge is factual, having been tested against empirical observation and experimentation, but knowledge of facts alone is not enough. There are also models and theories containing complex ideas and inter-relationships that must be understood, and considerable attention has been devoted across a range of scientific disciplines to measuring understanding. This case study will focus on one of the main tools employed: the concept inventory and in particular the Force Concept Inventory. The success of concept inventories in physics has spawned concept inventories in chemistry, biology, astronomy, materials science and maths, to name a few. We focus here on the FCI, ask how useful concept inventories are for evaluating learning gains. Finally, we report on recent work by the authors to extend conceptual testing beyond the multiple-choice format

Inventories in motion : a new approach to inventories over the business cycle

I propose an inventories-in-motion concept which represents a new approach to inventories over the business cycle. This channel has previously been ignored by macroeconomists. I build a general equilibrium business cycle model in which inventories arise naturally as a result of gaps between production of goods and their consumption as goods are distributed. These inventories are actively managed and adjusted to meet consumption and investment needs in the economy. Although conceptually very simple, I show that such inventory behaviour matches a number of stylised facts of aggregate inventories. Nonetheless, my model does not admit an important role for inventory management improvements in declining macroeconomic volatility in the last 30 years

An electronics Threshold-Concept Inventory: Assessment in the face of the dependency of concepts

The Theory of Threshold Concepts (TCs), first articulated by Land and Meyer in 2003, provides educators in many disciplines with a tool to identify those special ideas that both define the characteristic ways of thinking of expert practitioners, and cause the greatest learning difficulties for students. Concept inventories are popular assessment tools, epitomized by the widely-accepted Force Concept Inventory of Hestenes et al., introduced circa 1992. It is a natural marriage to bring these two thrusts together to produce “Threshold-Concept Inventories”. We report ongoing work to develop and verify such a TC-inspired inventory assessment tool in the field of electronics and simple circuit theory. We identify the difficulty in the development of questions targeted at assessing understanding of single threshold concepts and present results in support of a strategy to deal with this

In-class vs. online administration of concept inventories and attitudinal assessments

This study investigates differences in student responses to in-class and online administrations of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM), and the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS). Close to 700 physics students from 12 sections of three different courses were instructed to complete the concept inventory relevant to their course, either the FCI or CSEM, and the CLASS. Each student was randomly assigned to take one of the surveys in class and the other survey online using the LA Supported Student Outcomes (LASSO) system hosted by the Learning Assistant Alliance (LAA). We examine how testing environments and instructor practices affect participation rates and identify best practices for future use.Comment: 4 pages, 3 tables, 3 figures, Physics Education Research Conference proceeding

HOW TO DEVELOP AND USE CONCEPT INVENTORIES IN BIOLOGY

Scientific teaching is based on the principle that teaching should be conducted with the same rigor as scientific research. Concept inventories are multiple choice questions which assess student understanding and expose misconceptions in key concepts in an area of study (Redish, 2000). Validated concept inventories (Adams and Wieman, 2010) are useful tools in scientific teaching for assessing student gains in conceptual understanding and for comparing the effectiveness of different teaching strategies. Although published concept inventories currently exist for a number of biological topics there are still many gaps. However, there is increasing consensus for the steps that should be taken to develop a validated concept inventory. In this workshop you will participate in the process of developing concept inventories using as examples the challenging topics of meiosis and speciation. You will also work in small groups to come up with exercises that you can use with your students to improve their learning gains. In addition we will discuss ways to share concept inventories and the data they generate. References Adams W .and Wieman C. 2010. Development and validation of instruments to measure learning of expert-like thinking. International Journal of Science Education. Redish, E. F. (2000). Discipline-based education and education research: the case of physics. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 21, 85–96