Collaborative Research: ciHUB a virtual Community to Support Research, Development, and Dissemination of Concept Inventories

该项目是一个合作的努力，涉及工程教育教师和学习的科学家从普渡大学，得克萨斯州A M大学，卡内基梅隆大学，科罗拉多矿业学院，和伊利诺伊大学芝加哥。 它的重点是创建一个工程教育概念库存库（ciHUB），并开发一个用户，开发人员和研究人员的社区。概念量表测量学生的概念理解，并使教师能够评估教学方法的有效性。 该项目建立在现有概念清单开发和研究的坚实基础上，并建立在经过验证的HUB网络基础设施（nanoHUB）上。该项目的目标是：（1）利用独特的网络基础设施，将现有的概念清单迁移到一个单一的可访问位置，并支持教师和学生的协作社区;（2）在有针对性的基础工程课程中，吸引和装备不断增长的概念清单活跃用户社区;（3）进行研究，以指导概念清单的改进和社区实施。该项目有一个国家审查和评估委员会，每年开会评估进展情况并提供形成性反馈，它使用外部评估员沿着普渡大学学习中心的评估人员收集数据，表明在实现预期成果方面取得的进展。 教师发展活动、Prism杂志上的广告、与著名出版商的联系、与NSDL的链接、期刊文章、会议演示以及ciHUB本身都被用来扩大用户和开发人员的数量，并提供材料和结果。 更广泛的影响包括项目产品的广泛传播，教师的专业发展活动，并集中精力从少数民族服务机构从事教师。

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.