Emily M. Geraghty Ward

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

The Design of Place-Based, Culturally Informed Geoscience Assessment

ABSTRACT We present a mixed-methods approach to community-based assessment design that engages tribal college and university faculty, students, and science educators, as well as experts in cultural knowledge from the Blackfeet and Diné (Navajo) nations. Information from cultural experts, gathered through a combination of sequential surveys and focus group sessions, was analyzed to identify important themes with regard to assessment and geoscience content within the context of these communities. While experts use a variety of assessment approaches in their classrooms, only pre- and posttesting and portfolios were found to be most valuable. Experts indicated that the primary role of assessment was to monitor student progress, steer instruction, and prepare students for success; thus, assessment should be tied to the course goals. Experts differed on their views regarding sources of bias in testing, but overall they agreed that test language and content were both strong sources of bias. They indicated that input on assessment would help to incorporate local context and provide a mechanism for combating bias. Surveys completed by tribal college faculty and Native American students from Blackfeet Community College (BCC) and Arizona State University (ASU) provided information on the themes of geoscience, native science, place, and culture. Participants provided a variety of examples of important geoscience concepts that focused on (1) traditional geoscience concepts (e.g., the composition of Earth materials), (2) Earth system concepts (e.g., the environment and ecosystems), and (3) interactions between native culture and geoscience (e.g., incorporation of native language in science curriculum). Combined, these data offer the basis for developing place-based and culturally informed geoscience assessments by revealing geoscience content that is important to the local community. To aid in assessment design, one-on-one interviews with tribal college faculty and science educators, as well as students from BCC and ASU, provided specific feedback on the question validity of select items from an existing instrument: the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI). Emergent themes from the interview transcripts address assessment content, language, and format and reference school science, cultural knowledge, physical places, and connections to the local landscape (e.g., sense of place). Together, these data (1) address the validity of the GCI as a standardized assessment measure in these student populations and (2) provide the basis for developing open-ended assessment questions and concept inventory–like questions that incorporate this feedback.

Place-Based Education in Geoscience: Theory, Research, Practice, and Assessment

ABSTRACT Place-based education (PBE) is a situated, context-rich, transdisciplinary teaching and learning modality distinguished by its unequivocal relationship to place, which is any locality that people have imbued with meanings and personal attachments through actual or vicarious experiences. As an observational and historical science, geoscience is highly dependent on place, and place-based curricula and instructional methods apply to geoscience education. The sense of place operationalizes the human connection to place and functions as a definable and measurable learning outcome for PBE. Although PBE is rooted in historic and indigenous teaching philosophies, it has gained particular notice and traction in concert with more recent interest in environmental education, sustainability, and diversity in geoscience. This paper presents a current review of theory and research methods that have directly informed development of curriculum and instruction in, authentic assessment of, and implementation of PBE in geoscience sensu lato (Earth-system and environmental sciences); a survey of place-based teaching in geoscience currently or recently practiced across different grade levels and situated in different places, regions, and cultures; information about teaching and assessment methods for those who may be interested in adopting the place-based modality; and suggested future directions for research, practice, and assessment in PBE in geoscience.