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Concept inventories in computer science for the topic discrete mathematics

Published: 26 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This report describes concept inventories, specialized assessment instruments that enable educational researchers to investigate student (mis)understandings of concepts in a particular domain. While students experience a concept inventory as a set of multiple-choice items taken as a test, this belies its purpose, its careful development, and its validation. A concept inventory is not intended to be a comprehensive instrument, but rather a tool that probes student comprehension of a carefully selected subset of concepts that give rise to the most common and pervasive mismodelings. The report explains how concept inventories have been developed and used in other STEM fields, then outlines a project to explore the feasibility of concept inventories in the computing field. We use the domain of discrete mathematics to illustrate a suggested plan of action.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 38, Issue 4
December 2006
186 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1189136
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE-WGR '06: Working group reports on ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
    June 2006
    99 pages
    ISBN:1595936033
    DOI:10.1145/1189215
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 June 2006
Published in SIGCSE Volume 38, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. assessment
  2. assessment tools
  3. concept inventory
  4. discrete mathematics
  5. distractors
  6. misconceptions

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