No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
This paper describes a methodology for creating concept inventories that can be used to validly and reliably measure student misconceptions in engineering and science domains. Following the successful impact of the Force Concept Inventory on undergraduate physics education, creating concept inventories in engineering subjects provides engineering faculty and researchers with tools for measuring the effect of new curricular and pedagogical tools that are designed to repair misconceptions. The methodology involved aligning the three corners of the assessment triangle: cognition, observation, and interpretation. In the cognition corner, engineering students’ important misconceptions in thermal science were identified using a Delphi study and validated with current learning theory. In the observation corner, items for the TTCI were created and piloted. In the interpretation corner, classical test theory and item response theory were used to evaluate the performance of TTCI items and establish instrument reliability. Versions of the TTCI have been developed for heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics and piloted to over 1000 undergraduate engineering students. The heat transfer portion of the instrument consists of 12 items with an overall KR-20 reliability of 0.77. Item difficulty indices range from 0.25 to 0.75 and item discrimination index exceeds 0.20 for each item. These values are sufficient for using the TTCI as a tool to identify students’ misconceptions in thermal and transport science in two ways: (1) as an informal classroom assessment or (2) to establish pre-test/post-test learning gains during a course of study.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 89 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.