Achievement

To create and direct new approaches to overcome inherent challenges in interdisciplinary education at the undergraduate level, Trainee Mead is developing a concept inventory for biogeochemistry, an expanding interdisciplinary field taught to a wide range of undergraduate majors. The variation in preexisting knowledge increases the amount of review necessary for students with diverse backgrounds to be conversant with one another and it increases the potential number of misconceptions that must be corrected. To address this challenge, using procedures used by Libarkin and Anderson (2005, 2006) Mead is creating a concept list agreed upon by relative experts, testing those concepts in an open-ended format to identify existing misconceptions, and then will construct a multiple-choice test containing both the correct answer and incorrect answers (distractors) drawn from authentic misconceptions.