The EvoDevoCI: A Concept Inventory for Gauging Students’ Understanding of Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Abstract

The authors present the development and validation of the EvoDevoCI, a concept inventory for evolutionary developmental biology. This CI measures student understanding of six core evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) concepts using four scenarios and 11 multiple-choice items, all inspired by authentic scientific examples. Distracters were designed to represent the common conceptual difficulties students have with each evo-devo concept.

Redesigning a course to help students achieve higher-order cognitive thinking skills: from goals and mechanics to student outcomes

“…While 12 questions is a small sample, many validated concept inventories designed to assess the effectiveness of changes in instruction are in the range of [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]Refs. 27,38,46). Therefore, while our conserved questions represent a small sample set, we believe they still provide meaningful results.…”

The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics

“…Moreover, these values are comparable with those found in other published CIs, such as the Concept Inventory of Natural Selection (alpha = 0.58–0.64 [Anderson et al. , 2002]) or the EvoDevoCI (alpha = 0.31–0.73 [Perez et al. , 2013]).…”

A Primer for Developing Measures of Science Content Knowledge for Small-Scale Research and Instructional Use

“…While we determined that the supplement developers would be the most appropriate individuals to review our items, faculty and others with expertise in a particular field are an obvious resource for external review ( Kalas et al. , 2013 ; Perez et al. , 2013 ; Deane et al.…”

“…, 2014 ). Perez et al. (2013) , for example, asked reviewers, “Is the correct answer accurate given the scenario?” and “Do any of the other answers strike you as correct?” (p. 671).…”