Collaborative Research: ciHub, a Virtual Community to Support Research, Development, and Dissemination of Concept Inventories

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The project is a collaborative effort involving engineering education faculty and learning scientists from Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. It is focused on creating a repository of concept inventories in engineering education (ciHUB ) and on developing a community of users, developers, and researchers. Concept inventories measure students' conceptual understanding and enable instructors to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional approaches. The project is building on a strong foundation of existing concept inventories development and research and on a proven HUB cyberinfrastructure (the nanoHUB). The project goals are (1) to leverage a unique cyberinfrastructure to migrate existing concept inventories to a single accessible location and support a collaborative community of faculty members and students; (2) to engage and equip a growing community of active users of concept inventories in targeted fundamental engineering courses; and (3) to conduct research to guide concept inventory refinement and community implementation. The project has a National Review and Evaluation Board that meets annually to assess progress and provide formative feedback and it uses an external evaluator along with assessment staff in Purdue's learning center to gather data indicating progress toward the expected outcomes. Faculty development activities, advertisements in Prism magazine, a connection with a prominent publisher, links with the NSDL, journal articles, conference presentations, and the ciHUB itself are being used to expand the number of users and developers and to make the materials and results available. Broader impacts include the extensive dissemination of project products, faculty professional development activities, and a focused effort to engage faculty members from minority serving institutions.