Inspired by the greats of jazz, or the desire to solo in a local marching or colliery band, there was a time when every boy's first choice instrument was the trumpet.
The TTCI is a 26-item multiple choice instrument that measures students' understanding of phylogenetic trees.
These heterogeneous ideas cannot be uncovered by multiple-choice instruments alone, but may be better revealed by constructed-response assessments (Nehm and Schonfeld, 2008).
Efforts to develop effective tools for assessing undergraduate students' understanding of evolution have produced forced-choice instruments like the Concept Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS; Anderson et al., 2002), constructed-response questions (Bishop and Anderson, 1990; Nehm and Reilly, 2007; Nehm et al., 2012; Opfer et al., 2012), and oral interview protocols (Nehm and Schonfeld, 2008).
Changes in student understanding as measured by the ACORNS open-response question broadly agreed with the results from the multiple-choice instrument.
We began the instrument construction process by writing, testing, and revising a multiple-choice instrument, the GeDI-Draft 1.
We designed a multiple-choice instrument intended to assess students according to a subset of those course learning outcomes.
The TOSLS is a freely available, multiple-choice instrument that can be readily administered and scored in large-enrollment Gen Ed courses.
One approach is a return to an assessment tool format that has been developed previously by science education researchers, namely, the "two-tier" multiple-choice instrument (for examples, see Tamir, 1971; Treagust, 1988).
[Abstract available: www.informaworld.com/smpp/content∼db=all∼content=a912566870] Tsui and Treagust document the development and implementation of a two-tier multiple-choice instrument for diagnosing high school students' knowledge about genetics (tier 1) as well as their explanations of that knowledge ("reasoning," tier 2).
