ASM Concept Inventory Conference

在AAAS发表《本科生物学教育的愿景与变革》报告(2009年)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等人，2012年)--一套全面的六个核心概念和27个基于愿景与变化的基本声明。大学教师经常很难确定改变教学方法是否真的会增加学生的学习。这就是开发概念清单可以有所帮助的地方。概念清单是专门针对某一特定学科的核心概念的评估。它们通常是多项选择工具，使用普遍持有的误解作为干扰。为了支持本科生物学教育的创新，美国微生物学会(ASM)成立了三个委员会来构建、审查、验证和传播两个不同的概念清单。其中一个概念清单集中在微生物学专业的普通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健康科学的一般微生物学概念。第三委员会的职责是对这两个概念清单进行独立审查。开发和验证概念清单是一项耗时的工作，需要教员专家之间的大量合作。这次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初步工作(无论何时需要，都可以使用虚拟会议的形式进行)。该项目正接近开发阶段，需要面对面的讨论和规划。为期两天的会议将集中审查已经完成的工作。在这次会议上，研究人员将介绍和讨论来自正式审查的初步数据以及两个概念清单的早期班级试验的初步统计分析。与会者将审查每个概念清单，寻找潜在的差距，并根据需要编写新的问题来填补这些差距。一旦完成，这些概念清单将成为有用的工具，供数百名教授数万名微生物学学生的微生物学教师使用。能够准确、可靠地测量学生学习收获的概念清单可以被微生物学教学人员广泛使用。最后，概念清单小组将在概念清单在全国范围内较大规模使用后，在对每个问题进行统计分析后对其进行验证后，讨论并确定储存和分发已完成的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.