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Colleagues:

We are excited to announce that a new Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) WebCenter is now available for public use! This new webcenter offers an opportunity for the geoscience and science education communities to join us as authors of the GCI. Eventually, the WebCenter will become a place to: submit potential new GCI questions, review existing questions, create GCI subtests from the question bank, conduct online student testing, generate auto-reports of student results, and download anonymous multi-institutional data for use by any researcher.

While more features will be implemented at the GCI WebCenter in the future, two of the most important functions are now ready for use: online question submission and question review.  The buttons on the GCI front page that provide access to this functionality are the "Submit question to GCI WebCenter" and "Peer review" buttons.

We encourage you to begin using the GCI WebCenter to submit and review questions. You can access the GCI WebCenter through the following steps:

1) Go to http://gci.lite.msu.edu/

2) Click on the “Peer Review” or "Submit question to..." buttons (at 5 and 6 o'clock). Note that other buttons lead to explanatory text; these buttons will lead to other parts of the WebCenter as functions are added. The explanatory text briefly explains the GCI development cycle.

3) Register with the GCI WebCenter. You should receive confirmation within one business day.

4) SUBMIT A QUESTION! The Submit Question button allows submission of potential new GCI questions. You can download a Question Development Workbook for specific guidance in writing concept questions. Authors are encouraged to provide information about how and why their questions were developed, and the GCI team will provide additional steps for establishing question validity and reliability. Questions that have undergone community review and pilot testing will eventually become part of the GCI question bank.

5) REVIEW A QUESTION! The Peer Review button allows users to post comments and discussion about GCI questions. At the moment, only the 68 validated GCI v.2.1 questions are available for review. You can scroll through these questions and provide feedback as part of a discussion. As new questions become available for community review, you will see this page change to highlight specific content areas.

Please join us as authors of the GCI, and feel free to forward this message to anyone you think would like to become part of creating an assessment tool that is used, developed and authored by an entire community. We anticipate including several hundred new authors on this expanded GCI; the GCI will then become a unique tool "created for and by" all of us!

Sincerely,

Julie Libarkin, Steve Anderson, Gerd Kortemeyer, Stuart Raeburn


Acknowledgements. We thank our Advisory Board and all GCI v.1.0 users who graciously provided constructive feedback, encouraged us in this new initiative, and are poised to become authors on a community GCI. Development of GCI v.1.0 was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grants DUE-0127765, DUE-0350395, and DGE-9906479. The current project to revise and expand the GCI is funded by NSF through grants DUE-0717790 and DUE- 0717589. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.