All: This is something that a number of you may be interested in, so I thought I would reply to the listserve (even though I just emailed Steve to tell him he was now in the "club" of people who mistakenly email listervs - of which I am a member!) So: Absolutely, the discrimination of the GCI is something that is an important concern for research.I have an ongoing expert-novice research project right now, and while the GCI is a great tool for distinguishing novices and experts, it is not that great for parsing out LEVELS of expertise. Nor is it a good instrument beyond entry- level students, and we really need a tool for assessment of majors. Steve and I (and Gerd Kortemeyer) have a new NSF-funded project to revise and expand the GCI; ultimately, we hope that a large number of faculty and researchers will become GCI authors and write questions, and we hope to add ~500 new GCI questions. The choice of a 15-item GCI accommodates test fatigue. My personal perspective is that 17 good, thought-provoking questions is about the maximum that a normal (non-expert) test subject can complete without beginning to fatigue. A 45 question instrument would probably be too long, although certainly this would be a pretty simple thing to create and correlate with the existing 15-item version. P.S.: We'll be in touch VERY SOON to announce the GCI WebCenter! Take care Julie On Feb 4, 2009, at 3:35 PM, Anderson, Steven wrote: > Julie, I am up in Calgary giving my talk and thought about something > that has been bothering me about the GCI. We see essentially no > improvement with high pretesters which either means they didnlt > improve their conceptual understanding or that the 15 item subtest > is simply not sensitive enough (i mean if they get 12 right on the > pre test there really isn't much room for improvement). For those > using the gci for research this can be very limiting. Should we > think about maybe doing a 45 quetsion 'research-grade' gci subtest > for researchers that has more high end sensitivity (especially if we > want to study more advanced learners)? > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Julie Libarkin" <[log in to unmask]> > To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> > Sent: 2/4/09 1:12 PM > Subject: Subscribing to the list > > All: > > If you have colleagues who would like to subscribe to the listserv, > please send them these instructions: > > To subscribe to this list, send an email to [log in to unmask] > with the following text in the first line of the body of the message: > > SUBSCRIBE GEOED-RESEARCH FirstName LastName > > Thanks, > Julie > > Julie Libarkin > Assistant Professor, Director - Geocognition Research Lab > Dept. of Geological Sciences & Division of Science and Math Education > Michigan State University > 206 Natural Science > East Lansing, MI 48824 > 517-355-8369 > Julie Libarkin Assistant Professor, Director - Geocognition Research Lab Dept. of Geological Sciences & Division of Science and Math Education Michigan State University 206 Natural Science East Lansing, MI 48824 517-355-8369