ASM Concept Inventory Conference

美国科学促进会（AAAS）在2009年发表了题为《本科生物学教育的愿景与变化》的报告后不久，美国微生物学会（ASM）召集了一个委员会，制定了一份文件，概述了任何学习微生物学课程的学生都应该学习的核心概念。在全国数百名微生物学教师的参与下，ASM发布了《ASM本科微生物学课程指南》（Merkel et al., 2012）——一套全面的基于愿景和变化的6个核心概念和27个基本陈述。大学教师常常难以确定改变教学方法是否真的能提高学生的学习能力。这就是开发概念清单可以提供帮助的地方。概念清单是专门针对特定学科的核心概念的评估。它们是典型的选择题工具，使用普遍存在的误解作为干扰。为了支持本科生物教育的创新，美国微生物学会（ASM）成立了三个委员会来构建、审查、验证和传播两种不同的概念清单。一个概念清单侧重于微生物学专业在一般微生物学中教授的核心微生物学概念。第二个概念清单侧重于卫生科学的一般微生物学概念。第三个委员会的职责是对这两个概念清单进行独立审查。开发和验证一个概念清单需要大量的时间，并且需要教师专家之间的大量合作。ASM微生物学概念清单会议将这三个团队聚集在一起，因为他们已经完成了他们的初步工作（只要有需要，就会使用虚拟会议的形式）。该项目已接近需要面对面讨论和规划的发展阶段。为期两天的会议将集中审查已完成的工作。在本次会议上，研究人员将介绍和讨论来自正式审查的初步数据，以及来自两个概念清单的早期课堂试验的初步统计分析。与会者将回顾每个概念清单中潜在的空白，并根据需要编写新的问题来填补这些空白。一旦完成，这些概念清单将成为数百名微生物学教师教授数万名微生物学学生的有用工具。概念量表能准确可靠地衡量学生的学习成果，可广泛应用于微生物学教学。最后，概念清单团队将在概念清单在全国范围内大规模使用后，对每个问题进行统计分析后，一旦完成的概念清单得到验证，就会讨论并确定存储和传播完整概念清单的最佳机制。

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.