THE GEOSCIENCE CONCEPT INVENTORY: PHASE ONE FINDINGS AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

The Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) is a widely-used multiple-choice assessment instrument adopted by college faculty, high school teachers, and international scholars. Generation of the GCI started in 2001, requiring significant qualitative data collection and analysis, development, review and revision of questions, and utilization of advanced psychometric techniques. The unique, mixed-methods approach to developing and validating the GCI required an extensive, iterative methodology to ensure that the test items and the test itself generated research-quality data, and resulted in only 69 valid and reliable items in three years of development. It is now three years since the release of the GCI, and a first phase of research results from the geoscience community shows interesting relationships between teaching and learning, and makes clear the need for a greatly expanded GCI. Over thirty geoscience faculty and researchers have agreed to participate in GCI revision, expansion, online testing, and review, with the aim of creating a Rasch-normed bank of 500 questions by 2010. This overarching GCI will encompass the diversity of the geological sciences, while maintaining the statistical and qualitative rigor of the original GCI development effort.