Tools to facilitate development of conceptual understanding in the first and second year of engineering

Abstract

We want our students to understand and apply the concepts in each course. Therefore, we work hard to help our students master often-difficult concepts; however, our evaluation of their conceptual understanding often occurs simultaneously with evaluation of other learning goals through use of traditional problem-solving tests. Seldom do we measure pre-to-post learning gains. Often, instruments that would facilitate pre-to-post learning evaluation are not available. Creation, development, and use of such instruments would likely promote constructive conversations between engineering students and faculty members. Assessment instruments that have been designed to evaluate only conceptual understanding are often referred to as concept inventories, following a convention established by the Force Concept Inventory. Concept inventories have a range of possible uses, e.g., a pre-course diagnostic to understand conceptual understanding of students at the beginning of a course, early course formative assessment to guide instructional planning, summative assessment to evaluate conceptual understanding at the end of the course, and pre-post assessment to aid evaluation of instructional strategies. Concept inventories have been used at both course and program levels. What distinguishes concept inventories from typical engineering course assessment methods is focus on a small set of key constructs, focus on a specific domain of academic content, and focus on conceptual understanding or qualitative reasoning, as opposed to computational problem solving. Considerable scholarship informs selection of the situations, formulation of the question, and development of plausible distracters. During the workshop, participants will (i) be provided an overview of research on conceptual understanding, (ii) be provided an overview of the historical development of concept inventories, (iii) engage in activities to describe effective uses and some misuses of concept inventories in their courses, (iv) learn how to access existing concept inventories via the developing ciHUB.org platform, (v) discuss psychometric properties of existing instruments, (vi) learn how psychometric analysis can aid development of concept inventories, and (vii) have opportunities to become active members in a growing community of users.