Developing a Valid and Reliable Instrument to Measure Earth Systems Thinking Skills 

A major challenge in studying how students developing systems thinking skills in undergraduate geoscience courses is that there is no instrument to easily asses systems thinking abilities.   Developing an instrument requires a thorough grounding in psychometrics, and the results of the instrument must be demonstrated to be valid and reliable.  This means that the instrument measures what it claims to measure and that the results are repeatable (analogous to accuracy and precision).   

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As part of this line of research, I have not only carefully developed and piloted an Earth Systems Thinking Concept Inventory (EST CI), but I have worked to gather a large sample size in order to run the statistical tests and analyses to provide sufficient evidence of validity and reliability.  Once validated and published, I hope to use this answer a variety of future research questions on the development of Earth systems thinking skills.  This instrument will also serve as a tool to the geoscience education community to further research in this area as well as a useful tool in teaching.

 

As an offshoot of this project, I am also   developing a basic biogeochemistry content inventory that  can be used to assess the effectiveness of delivering biogeochemistry content in a variety of courses as well as a valuable research tool.