The Problem of Revealing How Students Think: Concept Inventories and Beyond

A common refrain heard from many college and university biology instructors is that undergraduate science students do not seem to possess the same scientific habits of mind as their instructors, nor do they seem to have command of fundamental principles and concepts that structure the expertise of their instructors (Hestenes et al., 1992; Khodor et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2006; Michael, 2007; D’Avanzo, 2008). In short, even our advanced undergraduate students do not seem to be scientifically literate—they cannot “ask and answer their own biologically relevant questions” (Wright, 2005). If we as university biology instructors are to make progress on the challenge of transforming our novice undergraduates into expert biological thinkers who are scientifically literate, then we all need tools that can aid us in revealing student thinking and in analyzing what we do in the classroom that supports or hinders the development of this scientific literacy in students. This is where classroom assessment—gathering evidence on students’ thinking—is a key part of teaching at any level (Angelo and Cross, 1993; Atkin et al., 2001; Black and Wiliam, 1998; Huba and Freed, 2000; Sundberg, 2002; Tanner and Allen, 2004). However, there are a myriad of approaches to collecting assessment evidence from students: minute papers to gain quick insight into student thinking, reflective journal writing to promote metacognition and reveal confusions, and concept mapping to examine the structure of students’ knowledge, to name just a few. Each of these many assessment approaches to monitor student thinking has its advantages and drawbacks, and some tools seem to work best for some topics or in the hands of some instructors. Here, we give an introduction to a relatively recent addition to the assessment tools in biology—the concept inventory—address its promising attributes and potential drawbacks, and raise the question of what concept inventories may actually measure. Finally, we consider potential alternative approaches to gaining insight into how students think about biology that come from the chemistry education and physics education research literatures. THE PROMISE OF CONCEPT INVENTORIES