THE MINERALOGY CONCEPT INVENTORY: A STATISTICALLY-VALIDATED ASSESSMENT TO MEASURE LEARNING GAINS AND COMPARE PEDAGOGIES

We developed the Mineralogy Concept Inventory (MCI), a statistically-validated assessment, to measure learning gains in any introductory mineralogy course. As part of the development process, the MCI was implemented in two undergraduate mineralogy courses at two different universities that have similar course content but employ different pedagogies: dominantly student-centered and dominantly instructor-centered. These contrasting pedagogies were chosen to assess the impact of pedagogical methods on student learning of mineralogy concepts.

Development of the MCI was an iterative process involving expert consultation, student interviews, assessment deployment, and statistical analysis. Experts at both universities were consulted to identify key concepts in both of the mineralogy courses. Think-aloud interviews with students were conducted to generate response options written in student language, providing the greatest chance that students will understand the questions as intended. The validity and reliability of the questions on the MCI was evaluated using Rasch analysis to ensure that the assessment covers a broad range of difficulties and that it can distinguish between low- and high-performing students. All questions were analyzed for differential item functioning to ensure that the test is not biased towards any subset of the population.

Average pre-assessment scores were approximately the same at both universities, however normalized learning gains were significantly higher in the course that uses a student-centered pedagogy (+0.44) compared to the course that uses an instructor centered-pedagogy (+0.24). These results suggest that the use of a student-centered pedagogy can significantly increase learning of mineralogy concepts.