ASM Concept Inventory Conference

American Society For Microbiology, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Soon after the report "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education was published by AAAS (2009), the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) convened a committee to create a document outlining the core concepts that any student in a microbiology course should learn. With the participation of hundreds of microbiology faculty across the country, the ASM published the ASM Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Microbiology (Merkel et al., 2012) - a comprehensive set of six core concepts and 27 fundamental statements based on Vision and Change. College instructors often struggle to determine if altering teaching methods actually leads to increased student learning. This is where the development of concept inventories can be helpful. Concept inventories are assessments that specifically address core concepts in a particular discipline. They are typically multiple choice instruments that use commonly held misconceptions as distractors. In support of innovation in undergraduate biology education, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) established three committees to construct, review, validate and disseminate two different concept inventories. One concept inventory focuses on core microbiology concepts taught in general microbiology for microbiology majors. The second concept inventory is focused on health sciences general microbiology concepts. The third committee's charge is the independent review of both of the concept inventories. Developing and validating a concept inventory is time intensive and requires a great deal of collaboration among faculty experts. This ASM Microbiology Concept Inventory Conference is bringing together these three teams now that they have completed their initial work (which has taken place using virtual meeting formats whenever there has been a need to meet). The project is nearing the stage of development where face-to-face discussion and planning are necessary. The two-day conference will allow a focused review of the work that has been completed. At this conference, researchers will present and discuss the preliminary data from the formal review as well as the initial statistical analysis from the early in-class trials for both concept inventories. Conference attendees will review each concept inventory for potential gaps and write new questions as needed to fill those gaps. Once completed, these concept inventories will be useful tools that will be available to hundreds of microbiology faculty teaching tens of thousands of microbiology students. Concept inventories that can accurately and reliably measure student learning gains can be widely used by faculty teaching microbiology. Lastly, the concept inventory teams will discuss and determine the best mechanism to both store and disseminate the completed concept inventories once they are validated after statistical analysis of each question after the concept inventories have been used on a larger, nationwide scale.