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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.