Julie Libarkin (Ohio University), and I were recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Assessment of Student Achievement Program to develop an tool that could assess learning in introductory college Earth Science courses.  Using grounded theory, scale development, and item response theory, we have constructed a Geoscience Concept Inventory that is both reliable and valid, and can be used to assess the effectiveness of teaching in a college classroom.  We have two papers in press discussing the GCT (Libarkin et al., 2005; Libarkin and Anderson, 2005) and have presented a number of papers at meetings (see publication list).  We have developed a new website devoted to the GCI, click here.

We used the GCI to assess learning in 42 different college-level geology courses nationwide during the Fall of 2002 (over 2200 students), and one of the most interesting outcomes of our testing was that some misconceptions in geology persisted, even in very good students, after instruction. In particular, students had difficulty with concepts relating to time and plate tectonics, perhaps the two most fundamental concepts in geology.  We are preparing a paper on this work (Anderson and Libarkin, 2005) and recently presented the work at the American Geophysical Union meeting (Anderson and Libarkin, 2003).

Julie Dahl from BHSU recently completed her Master's Thesis on geology misconceptions held by K-12 teachers.  Julie has a paper discussing the results of her work that has been accepted for publication (Dahl et al., 2005) and presented her work at the American Geophysical Union meeting (Dahl et al., 2003).

BHSU student Kathleen Lockhart conducted a study of geology misconceptions in Wyoming 1st through 6th graders, and found many of the same misconceptions that were displayed by college students.  Kathleen presented the results of her research at the Black Hills State University Research Symposium (Lockhart and Anderson, 2003).