ANNOUNCING THE NEW GEOSCIENCE CONCEPT INVENTORY ONLINE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM
The GCI Team and LectureTools are pleased to announce
their partnership in developing a FREE online assessment system. The LectureTools
Concept Assessment Tool (LTCAT, http://lecturetools.com/cat) can be used by faculty or researchers to diagnose student conceptions and to
evaluate learning. LTCAT ensures student anonymity through
internal de-identification of student responses, while maintaining the ability
to match pre- and post-instruction results. Faculty assigning a survey for
credit can access a list of respondents; those researchers with appropriate
human subjects approval can request identified data, as well.
Although most questions were designed for use with entry-level college students, new questions appropriate for students from middle school through upper-level geoscience majors are being contributed by our community co-authors. Specific questions and a discussion of question validity can be found at the GCI Wiki (http://geoscienceconceptinventory.wikispaces.com/). New questions are periodically uploaded into LTCAT, and become available for use in student surveys.
The Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) is a community-authored assessment tool tailored to meet the highest standards in instrument design. LectureTools is a perfect partner for the GCI as it offers LectureBook, a system already programmed to deliver homework questions to students. Together, the GCI Team and LectureTools are helping to provide the community with opportunities for understanding teaching and learning in the geosciences.
You can develop surveys for your courses or research projects by creating an account at http://lecturetools.com/cat. In a few short steps, you can create a course, choose questions to include on a survey, set start and end dates, upload a student roster, and send an email to your students. Short video tutorials have been made to help you through this process.
We hope you find this resource valuable, and we look forward to working with you!
Sincerely,
Julie Libarkin and the GCI Team (Special
thanks to Emily Geraghty Ward)
Perry Samson and LectureTools (Special
thanks to Judy Yu)
Development, expansion, and dissemination of the GCI were funded in part by NSF grants DUE-0127765, DUE-0350395, DGE-9906479, DUE-0717790, and DUE- 0717589. LectureTools was funded in part through NSF grant IIP-1058560. 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.