Revisiting the Geoscience Concept Inventory: A call to the community

The use of concept inventories in science and engineering has fundamentally changed the nature of instructional assessment. Nearly a decade ago, we set out to establish a baseline for widespread and integrated assessment of entry-level geoscience courses. The result was the first Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI v.1.0). We are now retiring GCI v.1. 0 and rebuilding the GCI as a more community-based, comprehensive, and effective instrument. We are doing this in the hopes that GCI users, many of whom have expressed a need for a revised and expanded instrument, and the geoscience community at large will view it as a springboard for collaborative action and engagement. If we work together as collaborators, the geosciences have the potential to evaluate learning across our community and over time. INTRODUCTION The Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI; Fig. 1) was developed to diagnose conceptual understanding and assess learning in entry-level geoscience courses. The GCI has become a staple in many classroom-based research studies, is being revised for use in pre-college settings, and has been shown to discriminate between experts and novices. Although a valuable research tool, the GCI is in need of an expansion that can only be accomplished by a community of geoscientists and educators working together. This paper is a call for that collaboration. The GCI holds a unique place in the concept inventory world for several reasons. First, the GCI is the only concept inventory to generate a bank of correlated concept inventory questions for higher education science (Libarkin and Anderson, 2006). Through this correlation, users of the GCI can create course-specific subtests rather than being tied to a single set of questions. Second, the GCI contains single response, two-tier, and multiple-response multiple-choice questions. Two-tier questions offer added insight into student thinking by requesting an explanation for student responses (Treagust, 1988). Multipleresponse questions, essentially a set of true/false items, are generally more difficult than typical single-response items and are cognitively similar to free response questions, offering deeper insight into cognition (Kubinger and Gottschall, 2007). Third, GCI questions were developed from ideas that both experts and novices found important for entry-level geoscience courses. A review of textbooks provided initial ideas about important concepts for inclusion on the GCI, while open-ended interviews with students provided additional topics (Libarkin and Anderson, 2005). For example, in-depth interviews suggest that students conflate gravity and magnetism and inflate the importance of magnetic fields on the movement of large objects. Addressing this mixing and mis-scaling is important for student understanding of geomagnetism and its effects, a discovery that only became apparent after considering the student perspective. THE NEED TO REVISE AND EXPAND THE GCI AS A COMMUNITY The original GCI questions were piloted with up to 5,000 students enrolled at >40 institutions nationwide, with the current version in use by >200 faculty and researchers. The GCI has been used to estimate learning in geoscience courses, including evaluation of specific instructional approaches (e.g., Kortz et al., 2008) and analysis of learning (e.g., Petcovic and Ruhf, 2008). In ongoing work, GCI scores have been shown to correlate strongly with geological mapping ability. This suggests that the GCI, a measure of very foundational knowledge, can be used as a skills measure to predict performance on an expert task. While we are encouraged that GCI v.1. 0 was useful in these studies, we acknowledge that the instrument ingrains our own biases and limitations. As many of our colleagues have stated, the GCI is both an effective instrument for gauging learning in entry-level geoscience courses and a test in need of revision. The diversity of geoscience courses at all levels should be reflected in the assessment instruments used to evaluate learning nationwide. Expansion to more complex, wider ranging questions will allow replicable assessment in advanced courses and across geoscience programs. A critical need for questions targeted toward upper-level courses requires community GSA Today, v. 21, no. 8, doi: 10.1130/G110GW.1 *libarkin@msu.edu Revisiting the Geoscience Concept Inventory: A call to the community GROUNDWORK T H E G EO LO GI CAL SCIETY OF AM ERIC A Furthering the Inf luence of Earth Science